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Finance Bill Reminder Software for Mac – Chronicle | LittleFin LLC
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Review: TranscriptPad — review and manage depositions on your iPad – iPhone J.D.
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Announcing Principles of Biology, an Interactive Textbook by Nature Education
Nature Education is delighted to announce the launch of a new series of affordable, high quality interactive textbooks in college-level science. The first textbook in the series, Principles of Biology, is intended for university-level biology courses. The first title in the series is Principles of Biology, intended for introductory biology classes.
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Cartels Are an Emergent Phenomenon, Say Complexity Theorists – Technology Review
Under certain market conditions, cartels arise naturally without collusion. This raises important questions over how the behavior should be controlled.
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A collaboration of scientists, artists, students, and anyone else interested in science, this project produces small zines and web comics on a variety of topics . Read online, download zines, and share your ideas here!
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The Law of Online Sharing – Technology Review
Facebook’s impending problem is that even if the company enables future pacemakers to share our every heartbeat, the company cannot automate caring—the most important part of the feedback loop that has driven the social Web’s ascent. Nothing can support exponential growth for long. No matter how cleverly our friends’ social output is summarized and highlighted for us, there are only so many hours in the day for us to express that we care. Today, the law of social sharing is a useful way to think about the rise of social computing, but eventually, reality will make it obsolete.
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Serious Service Sag – Adaptive Path
This is a big gap where businesses choose to invest in their services. They spend a lot of money to tell you how great the service is, and then, all too often, the service doesn’t live up to the hype. Brands become hypocrites thanks to their own investments.
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The Predator State | Mother Jones
Today, the signature of modern American capitalism is neither benign competition, nor class struggle, nor an inclusive middle-class utopia. Instead, predation has become the dominant feature—a system wherein the rich have come to feast on decaying systems built for the middle class. The predatory class is not the whole of the wealthy; it may be opposed by many others of similar wealth. But it is the defining feature, the leading force. And its agents are in full control of the government under which we live.
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National Public Rodeo | Business | Vanity Fair
When most people hear “NPR,” they think Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, Robert Siegel, and for some on the far right, all that is wrong with the mainstream liberal media. But beneath the veneer of the “Minnesota nice,” a simmering battle has been waged, and in the balance hangs NPR’s future and perhaps even its soul—as either a nonpartisan defender of in-depth journalism or a target of the partisan sniping of the sound-bite era. David Margolick explores how NPR’s management managed to squander the advantages of the national dole, deep-pocketed donors, a roster of top-notch reporters, and the loyalty of legions of devoted Click and Clack fans—and whether it can recover from the annus horribilis of 2011.
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” The initial 2012 conference will be based on an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (IATDH) sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the UNC Charlotte Complex Systems Institute this past year that was dedicated to computer modeling in the humanities and social sciences. In keeping with the theme of the IATDH, the topic for our first conference will be: Modeling Complexity in the Humanities and Social Sciences.”
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International Association of Computing And Philosophy
“The IACAP exists to promote scholarly dialogue and research on all aspects of the computational and informational turn, and on the use of information and communication technologies in the service of philosophy”
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Check the bibliography. “DIPIR is an IMLS-funded project led by Dr. Ixchel Faniel and Dr. Elizabeth Yakel. Together with partners at The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, and Open Context, they are studying data reuse in three academic disciplines to identify how contextual information about the data that supports reuse can best be created and preserved. The project focuses on research data produced and used by quantitative social scientists, archaeologists, and zoologists. The intended audiences of this project are researchers who use secondary data and the digital curators, digital repository managers, data center staff, and others who collect, manage, and store digital information. Knowledge gained from the study will help guide current and future international practices for curating and preserving digital research data.”
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Panel: Young Adult Speculative Fiction – SF Signal – A Speculative Fiction Blog
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Leap seconds: Their time has come | The Economist
But possibly no longer. Next week, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is meeting in Geneva, and one of the items on its agenda is the abolition of the leap second. If the assembled delegates vote in favour, then the next leap second (which will be added one second before midnight on June 30th, causing clocks set to UTC to display 23:59:59 for two seconds instead of one) will be one of the last—and the answer to the question “what time is it?” will have ceased to have anything to do with the revolutions of the heavens.
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Too Much Information with Benjamen Walker
“Too Much Information is the sober hangover after the digital party has run out of memes, apps and schemes. Host Benjamen Walker finds out that, in a world where everyone overshares the truth 140 characters at a time, telling tales might be the most honest thing to do.”
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Douglas Rushkoff – Blog – CNN: Why I am learning to code and you should, too
“Most adults realize that, say, Facebook is engineered to increase the value of our “social graphs” to its customers, the corporations and research firms that buy this data. We understand that we’re not the customers, but the product. The more critically we engage with all of the iPhones and Google searches in our lives, the better we can tell what they want from us. But I no longer think that’s enough. It took a few centuries after the invention of text for regular people to learn how to read and write. The printing press, which democratized print by reducing the cost of manuscripts, certainly helped. Now that we live in a world with newspapers, road signs, package labels and drug inserts, almost no one still questions the idea that teaching kids to read is a good thing, or that basic literacy makes us more likely to create value for ourselves or our employers.”
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Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates « Gravity and Levity
“This is the Gompertz law, in cartoon form: your body is deteriorating over time at a particular rate. When its “internal policemen” are good enough to patrol every spot that might contain a criminal 14 times a day, then you have the body of a 25-year-old and a 0.03% chance of dying this year. But by the time your police force can only patrol every spot 7 times per day, you have the body of a 95-year-old with only a 2-in-3 chance of making it through the year.”
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Climate change becomes a flash point in science education – latimes.com
“Some states have introduced education standards requiring teachers to defend the denial of man-made global warming. A national watchdog group says it will start monitoring classrooms.”
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The Rise of the New Groupthink – NYTimes.com
“Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. “
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Thomas Edsall’s The Age of Austerity, reviewed – Slate Magazine
“The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics by veteran political reporter Thomas Edsall, suggests that’s a mistake. Writers both friendly and hostile to the banking establishment have focused on the continuity at some high levels of policymaking. Ben Bernanke has stayed on as top central banker; Timothy Geithner slid from the New York Fed to the Treasury after Obama’s inauguration; TARP was a bipartisan collaboration between Nancy Pelosi and George W. Bush, continued by his successor. Various former investment bankers have shuffled in and out of office in Washington. Lost or marginalized in these tales is the extraordinary partisan political mobilization of the past several years.”
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The End of Mass Media Mentalities and the Sciences « The Scholarly Kitchen
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Commercial code (communications) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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” My expertise is creating systems to change human behavior. I call this “Behavior Design.” I devote about 50% of my time to Stanford and 50% to industry innovation. For me, working in both worlds makes sense: My Stanford work makes me better in industry. And what I learn in industry improves my Stanford research. I’m always eager to help other innovators. “
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Contrary Brin: Are we “evolving” toward becoming “marching morons”?
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Comments, mostly con, on “The precariat is a flexible workforce reliant on short-term employment. They’re temps, part-timers, seasonal laborers, freelancers, even interns — people without traditional unions to rely on. There is nothing below them, only the safety net’s tatters. “[Their] lives and identities are made up of disjointed bits, in which they cannot construct a desirable narrative or build a career, combining forms of work and labour, play and leisure in a sustainable way.””
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History 62, The History of Reading, Spring 2012 | Easily Distracted
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Geek of the Week: Bill Sleeper, 96-year-old tech enthusiast – GeekWire
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Sense about Science – Equipping people to make sense of science and evidence
“We are a charitable trust that equips people to make sense of scientific and medical claims in public discussion.”
Monthly Archives: January 2012
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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Boston Review — Claude S. Fischer: Not So Nasty, Brutish, and Short
“Even if we don’t fully understand the reasons for the decline in rates of violence, the decline is real, and Pinker describes it vividly and lucidly. He nonetheless worries, as well he should, that his audience will not remember this Good News. Some parts of it have been told before. For instance, a commission appointed by Lyndon Johnson to explain the civil disorders of the 1960s reported that violence in the United States had dropped greatly over the course of its history. Though noted by the media at the time, that information was soon forgotten, and so the surprise on Pinker’s book tour. “
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Stumbling and Mumbling: Cakes, capitalism & happiness
“But why do we spend too much time on comfort goods and ordinary consumer spending and not enough on creative activities? One reason, says Pugno is that the latter require investment in “leisure skills” – the ability to play an instrument, garden or appreciate art. Such investment, like any other, is costly. At any point in time, therefore, we might prefer the zero-cost option of comfort goods. But this means we never acquire the skills needed to make best use of our leisure.”
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interfluidity » Why is finance so complex?
“Finance has always been complex. More precisely it has always been opaque, and complexity is a means of rationalizing opacity in societies that pretend to transparency. Opacity is absolutely essential to modern finance. It is a feature not a bug until we radically change the way we mobilize economic risk-bearing. The core purpose of status quo finance is to coax people into accepting risks that they would not, if fully informed, consent to bear.”
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The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World, Allen
“In The Institutional Revolution, Douglas W. Allen offers a thought-provoking account of another, quieter revolution that took place at the end of the eighteenth century and allowed for the full exploitation of the many new technological innovations. Fundamental to this shift were dramatic changes in institutions, or the rules that govern society, which reflected significant improvements in the ability to measure performance—whether of government officials, laborers, or naval officers—thereby reducing the role of nature and the hazards of variance in daily affairs. Along the way, Allen provides readers with a fascinating explanation of the critical roles played by seemingly bizarre institutions, from dueling to the purchase of one’s rank in the British Army.”
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The richness of Twitter | Felix Salmon
“On top of that, Twitter is a snapshot of life, not of the news. If you were to listen to all the conversations in your city right now, some of them would be about the news; most would not. Many of them would be about celebrities, because the purpose of celebrities is in large part to give everybody something to talk about — a shared cultural touchstone. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that celebrities are popular on Twitter. But that doesn’t mean in any sense that they’re supplanting the news.”
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Overcoming Bias : Dear Young Eccentric
“Think of it this way. When some folks go out of their way to show off their defiance and rebellion, others go out of their way to publicly squash such rebellion, to assert their dominance. But if you are not overtly rebellious, you can get away with a lot of abstract idea rebellion — few folks will even notice such deviations, and fewer still will care. So, ask yourself, do you want to look like a rebel, or do you want to be a rebel?”
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How Art History Majors Power the U.S. Economy: Virginia Postrel – Bloomberg
“The students who come out of school without jobs aren’t, for the most part, starry-eyed liberal arts majors but rather people who thought a degree in business, graphic design or nursing was a practical, job-oriented credential. Even the latest target of Internet mockery, a young woman the New York Times recently described as studying for a master’s in communication with hopes of doing public relations for a nonprofit, is in what she perceives as a job-training program. The higher-education system does have real problems, including rising tuition prices that may not pay off in higher earnings. But those problems won’t be solved by assuming that if American students would just stop studying stupid subjects like philosophy and art history and buckle down and major in petroleum engineering (the highest-paid major), the economy would flourish and everyone would have lucrative careers. That message not only ignores what students actually study. It also disregards the diversity and dynamism of the economy, in good times as well as bad.”
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DARK AGES AMERICA — Blog for Morris Berman
Morris Berman is well known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and North America, and has held visiting endowed chairs at Incarnate Word College (San Antonio), the University of New Mexico, and Weber State University.
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Huge US command-&-control airship gets quantum optics • The Register
Pentagon boffinry powerhouse DARPA has announced plans to fit a giant new US military command and control airship – known as “Blue Devil Block 2″ – with through-the-air optical links offering bandwidth normally achievable only by fibre cables. This is to be done using newly-applied technology developed in the 1990s for use in astronomical telescopes.
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Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees. He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”
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Raritania: A Revolution of Falling Expectations: Whither the Singularity?
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Strange Horizons Reviews: 2011 In Review, reviewed by Our Reviewers
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Tiara.org is the personal homepage of Alice Marwick, aka alicetiara. I am a social software researcher based in Boston and New York City.
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Treating a Nation of Anxious Wimps
We’ve become a nation of hypochondriacs. Every sneeze is swine flu, every headache a tumor. And at great expense, we deliver fantastically prompt, thorough and largely unnecessary care. There is tremendous financial pressure on physicians to keep patients happy. But unlike business, in medicine the customer isn’t always right. Sometimes a doctor needs to show tough love and deny patients the quick fix. A good physician needs to have the guts to stand up to people and tell them that their baby gets ear infections because they smoke cigarettes. That it’s time to admit they are alcoholics. That they need to suck it up and deal with discomfort because narcotics will just make everything worse. That what’s really wrong with them is that they are just too damned fat. Unfortunately, this type of advice rarely leads to high patient satisfaction scores.
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John Brockman: the man who runs the world’s smartest website | Technology | The Observer
Interview with founder/editor of the edge.org
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Infinite Stupidity | Conversation | Edge
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.
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5 tips for using your Apple gear to stay fit and healthy in 2012 — Apple News, Tips and Reviews
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TUAW Best of 2011 wrap-up and editor picks | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog
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REAPER | Audio Production Without Limits
REAPER is digital audio workstation software: a complete multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment.
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From underwear to aircraft noise: logging 70 years of social change
The summer of 2011 marks the seventieth anniversary of the very first Government Social Survey. In celebration, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) pays tribute to the thousands of interviewers who have asked the public questions on everything from underwear to aircraft noise. We have delved into the archives and picked surveys from 1941, 1951, etc to mark each decade.
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BBC News – Why state surveys asked about bras and haddock
From bra ownership to television interference, the government has wanted to know some strange stuff about people in the UK. Now a history of social surveys reveals why.