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Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users « Clay Shirky
“To understand newspapers’ 15-year attachment to paywalls, you have to understand “Everyone must pay!” not just as an economic assertion, but as a cultural one. Though the journalists all knew readership would plummet if their paper dropped imported content like Dear Abby or the funny pages, they never really had to know just how few people were reading about the City Council or the water main break. Part of the appeal of paywalls, even in the face of their economic ineffectiveness, was preserving this sense that a coupon-clipper and a news junkie were both just customers, people whose motivations the paper could serve in general, without having to understand in particular.”
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Will Joel Garreau & Jamais Cascio Prevail — Along With The Rest Of Us? | ACCELER8OR
““There are three scenarios: Heaven – in which our inventions conquer pain, suffering, stupidity, ignorance, and even death. Hell – in which our creations wipe out the human race or all of life on earth within a generation. And Prevail – which argues that these first two scenarios are technodeterministic. “In the Prevail Scenario, what really matters – as always – is not how many transistors we get to talk to each other, but how many ornery, imaginative, unpredictable human beings we can bring together to arrive at surprising ways to co-evolve with our challenges. Because only in this bottom-up way will humans really control their destinies, rather than have them controlled by our creations.””
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Flattened « how to save the world
“Fearful and flattened. That’s what our industrial growth culture wants and needs of its members, now that it is a global monoculture strained to its absolute limits. Unless exercised in a culturally-approved way (such as “competitive” sports, wars, or abuse of one’s work or social “subordinates”), or locked away behind closed doors where there is plausible deniability, anger is now met with quick and violent suppression. Peaceful but angry demonstrations are met with heavily-armed stormtroopers. Anyone who even discusses angry resistance to the ecological desolation of our planet, to the theft and pillaging of Earth’s resources for the benefit of a tiny rapacious 1%, or to wars over oil or ideology, is branded a “terrorist” and subject to “disappearance”, extraordinary rendition to torture prisons, and/or indefinite imprisonment. Likewise, feelings of debilitating grief, which I think are perfectly normal in our terrible world, have been pathologized and are now treated with large doses of anti-depressants or, failing that, ostracism and/or incarceration or other institutionalization. Our industrial culture teaches us to self-victimize. We are to blame, we are told, for our own unemployment and poverty (due to personal laziness or lack of moral fibre). We are to blame, too, for our own chronic illnesses (due to our poor eating and exercising habits). Suicide is, of course, treated not only as a sign of irresponsibility, but as a crime.”
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Mythbusters Banned From Discussing RFID By Visa And Mastercard | Disinformation
Host Adam Savage of Mythbusters tells how Visa, Mastercard, and Discover had the Discovery Channel put the kibosh on an episode that would have revealed just how “trackable and hackable” the RFID chips found in many credit cards are. It’s a telling example of how corporate advertisers serve as the gatekeepers of mainstream media/entertainment:
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JAH – Dec. 2011 – Conservatism: A Round Table
“In recent years there has been a remarkable expansion of historical scholarship on twentieth-century American conservatism. This new literature comprises a rich and exciting body of work, one that is in direct dialogue with developments in contemporary U.S. politics. Kim Phillips-Fein offers an assessment of the state of the field, suggesting an evolution away from writing about conservatism as a “backlash” against the 1960s and toward seeing it as a political movement gaining strength over the entire postwar period. She outlines how the new scholarship on conservatism might alter how we teach the narrative of the twentieth century, and she suggests some of the interpretive questions that remain about the place of conservatism in American history. Following Phillips-Fein’s article, the conservatism scholars Alan Brinkley, Donald T. Critchlow, Martin Durham, Matthew D. Lassiter, Wilfred M. McClay, and Lisa McGirr offer perspectives on the state of the field.”
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Jon Taplin’s Home Page » American Crack-Up
“This election should be fought on this pie chart. Where are we going to spend our collective wealth? On guns, jet fighters and tanks or on schools, hospitals and roads. This will mean that the Democrats will have to have the courage to fight the “soft on terrorism” brickbrats thrown by Newt or Mitt. Ron Paul is already used to hearing this bullshit, and it doesn’t seem to be bothering him.”
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Critical transitions are sudden, often irreversible, changes that can occur in a large variety of complex systems; signals that warn of critical transitions are therefore highly desirable. We propose a new method for early warning signals that integrates multiple sources of information and data about the system through the framework of a generalized model. We demonstrate our proposed approach through several examples, including a previously published fisheries model. We regard our method as complementary to existing early warning signals, taking an approach of intermediate complexity between model-free approaches and fully parameterized simulations. One potential advantage of our approach is that, under appropriate conditions, it may reduce the amount of time series data required for a robust early warning signal.
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Facebook, Google, and the Future of the Online ‘Commons’ – James Fallows – Technology – The Atlantic
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So whaddaya think: should we put truthtelling back up there at number one? » Pressthink
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Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong | GeekDad | Wired.com
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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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.”
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.
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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Sampling the Multiverse: Three from 2011 – The Barnes & Noble Review
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Omnivoracious: 2011 Overlooked Books? Unique Fantasy, SF, and Horror You Might Have Missed
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American Class System – We Are Not All Created Equal, by Stephen Marche – Esquire
In ten years, the next generation will no longer have the faintest illusion that the United States is a country with equality of opportunity. The least they’re entitled to is some honesty about why.
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Holiday Gift Guide: iPhone Apps for the Home | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog
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Noahpinion: The liberty of local bullies
I have often remarked in the past how libertarianism – at least, its modern American manifestation – is not really about increasing liberty or freedom as an average person would define those terms. An ideal libertarian society would leave the vast majority of people feeling profoundly constrained in many ways. This is because the freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers, whom I call “local bullies.”
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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Two Theories of Home Heat Control* – Kempton – 2010 – Cognitive Science – Wiley Online Library
People routinely develop their own theories to explain the world around them. These theories can be useful even when they contradict conventional technical wisdom. Based on in-depth interviews about home heating and thermostat setting behavior, the present study presents two theories people use to understand and adjust their thermostats. The two theories are here called the feedback theory and the valve theory. The valve theory is inconsistent with engineering knowledge, but is estimated to be held by 25% to 50% of Americans. Predictions of each of the theories are compared with the operations normally performed in home heat control. This comparison suggests that the valve theory may be highly functional in normal day-to-day use. Further data is needed on the ways this theory guides behavior in natural environments.
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People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives. The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real-time explanations with visible mechanisms. We demonstrate the illusion of depth with explanatory knowledge in Studies 1–6. Then we show differences in overconfidence about knowledge across different knowledge domains in Studies 7–10. Finally, we explore the mechanisms behind the initial confidence and behind overconfidence in Studies 11 and 12, and discuss the implications of our findings for the roles of intuitive theories in concepts and cognition.
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The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline-based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5-year-olds could cluster knowledge in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline-based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined.
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The Feasibility of Folk Science – Keil – 2010 – Cognitive Science – Wiley Online Library
If folk science means individuals having well worked out mechanistic theories of the workings of the world, then it is not feasible. Laypeople’s explanatory understandings are remarkably coarse, full of gaps, and often full of inconsistencies. Even worse, most people overestimate their own understandings. Yet recent views suggest that formal scientists may not be so different. In spite of these limitations, science somehow works and its success offers hope for the feasibility of folk science as well. The success of science arises from the ways in which scientists learn to leverage understandings in other minds and to outsource explanatory work through sophisticated methods of deference and simplification of complex systems. Three studies ask whether analogous processes might be present not only in laypeople but also in young children and thereby form a foundation for supplementing explanatory understandings almost from the start of our first attempts to make sense of the world.
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Concepts seem to consist of both an associative component based on tabulations of feature typicality and similarity judgments and an explanatory component based on rules and causal principles. However, there is much controversy about how each component functions in concept acquisition and use. Here we consider two assumptions, or dogmas, that embody this controversy and underlie much of the current cognitive science research on concepts. Dogma 1: Novel information is first processed via similarity judgments and only later is influenced by explanatory components. Dogma 2: Children initially have only a similarity-based component for learning concepts; the explanatory component develops on the foundation of this earlier component. We present both empirical and theoretical arguments that these dogmas are unfounded, particularly with respect to real world concepts; we contend that the dogmasarise from a particular species of empiricism that inhibits progress in the study of conceptual structure; and finally, we advocate the retention of a hybrid model of the structure of knowledge despite our rejection of these dogmas.
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Fearing Terrorism, U.S. Asks Journals to Censor Articles on Virus – NYTimes.com
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Good example for the “illusion of explanatory depth”
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12 Days of Christmasy Citizen Science Projects | SciStarter Blog
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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UnderstandingSociety: Structural adjustment for the middle class?
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Robert Paterson’s Weblog: Libraries – The Hacker Space – Future of the Real New Economy
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You Say You Want a Devolution? | Style | Vanity Fair
“For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.”
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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“More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.”
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American Democracy? | Savage Minds
“Many hopeful individuals cite internet-based social media as a networked communications system capable of improving democracy by routing around the corporate “noise” and towards a vibrant non-market public sphere. The internet has produced new conditions for peer-to-peer and disintermediated communication, it is true. But what the cynical scholars and activists are saying might be true as well. Democracies require explicitly engaged citizens that demand civically minded, accessible, and participatory media systems to thrive. Are these pre-conditions for democracy being met in America?”
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UnderstandingSociety: David Graeber’s reflections on money, debt, and violence
“The book is difficult to characterize. It’s about debt and money through history, but it’s really not a work in economic history. It offers a lot of ethnographic detail about borrowing, lending, gifting, and reciprocating, but it’s not really a work of anthropology. And it offers morally valenced language to describe debt and credit, but it’s not really a polemical critique of the present financial system. It is certainly an engaging, interesting, and thought-provoking book, and Graeber appears to know a great deal about the social and institutional histories of the main civilizations of Eurasia.”
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U.S. Intellectual History: Marking Time through War
“In my introduction, I found it important to deal briefly with Randolph Bourne’s warning that war was “the health of the state” because through war the state exercised its ultimate power to command sacrifice. What Bourne probably didn’t imagine was that his country would enter a period of almost perpetual war. And thus, as war became a constant presence in American society, it also became something more than the political barometer Bourne suggested. I argue that war grew from a moment to reckon with immediately following America’s atomic bombing of Japan (the photo above is from Hiroshima) to, in our time, a source of almost theological inspiration for the nation. Along the way, a variety of actors also considered how the idea of war had grown increasingly commonplac”
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“I made this little program so you can view and link to a whole conversation from Twitter in context.”
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Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress – Bloomberg
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Barbara Czarniawska – Gothenburg Research Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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Welcome to the Tufts Geospatial Data Repository Search, discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data from multiple repositories
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Infographic: What the New Digital Divide Looks Like – COLORLINES
The defining question of the information age is no longer who’s online, but how they got there. In a Colorlines.com investigation, Jamilah King explains how big telecom created two Internets—one in which consumers and their content enjoys some, limited protection and another in which they are left prey to mobile wireless companies’ decisions. People of color, who have closed the traditional digital divide with their smartphones, are streaming into the latter space—and as a result, racial inequity is being wired into the 21st century economy.
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Nuts and Bolts: Inviting Interaction by Jane Bozarth : Learning Solutions Magazine
So much learning is informal and unconscious; often learners don’t think of it as “learning something” but as “solving a problem.” Research from Allen Tough tells us that the typical (in the research, middle-class) adult engages in five self-directed learning projects a year, investing an average of 100 hours in each. The problem is, most adults don’t think of themselves as embarking on self-directed learning projects. They think of it as figuring out how to build a deck, or how to win at World of Warcraft, or how to get the best deal on a new car. They choose their own methods, from Googling, to practicing, to asking Joe the coworker, to attending workshops at the local hardware store.
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by Paul Graham
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The Research Bust – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Robert Reich (The Most Important Economic Speech of His Presidency)
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Threepenny: Young, Discharged into Clouds
On the fifth floor I spent 10 days learning how to walk never far above the earthworms, never far below the sky. The darkness there
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The Deepening Paradox — KarlSchroeder.com
“So are we alone? Well, there is one other possibility, at this point. I’ve lately been trumpeting my revision of Clarke’s Law (which originally said ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’). My revision says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. (Astute readers will recognize this as a refinement and further advancement of my argument in Permanence.) Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.”
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“To Prevail is to accept that our technological tools are changing how our humanity expresses itself, but not changing who we are. It is to know that such changes are choices we make, not destinies we submit to. It is to recognize that our technologies are manifestations of our culture and our politics, and embed the unconscious biases, hopes, and fears we all carry — and that this is something to make transparent and self-evident, not kept hidden. We can make far better choices about our futures when we have a clearer view of our present. To Prevail is to see something subtle and important that both critics and cheerleaders of technological evolution often miss: our technologies will, as they always have, make us who we are. Human plus a Computer equals a Human.”
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“The Prevail Project aims to be the worldwide clearinghouse for humanistic response to rapid technological change. Its goal is to accelerate bottom-up, enlightened triumph in the face of exponential challenges the way the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency accelerates technology. Its core hope is that in the face of unprecedented transformation, humans will continue to prevail, shaping their own futures, toward their own ends, rather than being the pawns of their explosively powerful technologies. For the only enduring advantage is to learn faster than the competition. And the best way to anticipate the future is to invent it yourself.”
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The End of Cyberspace: Keywords of human-computer differences
“One of the reasons that predictions about the death of the library, office, workplace, book, etc. in the age of the Internet have not come to pass is that these older institutions or technologies had uses that went beyond the strictly functional ones of information processing, storage, retrieval, etc.. Offices, for example, aren’t just places where knowledge workers move zeros and ones around; the good ones are creative spaces that offer workers access to unique stores of informal knowledge. “
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The Partisan and the Political
“To summarize the thesis: ordinary people hate partisanship, and elites hate ideology. Hence the elite is constantly attempting to misrepresent the latter as the former. And the masses sometimes respond by repudiating ideology when they mean to reject partisanship. “
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Boston Review — Occupy the Future
“Editor’s Note: We have closely followed the Occupy movement and welcome both the attention it has drawn to societal problems and its potential to re-democratize American politics. As part of our continuing engagement with the protests, we are publishing a series of opinion essays by Stanford University professors exploring key issues raised by Occupy. The following statement from the group introduces the series.”
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Contrary Brin: Atlas Shrugged: The Hidden Context of the Book and Film
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Library as Incubator Project |
The Library as Incubator Project was created by Erinn Batykefer, Laura Damon-Moore, and Christina Endres, three graduate students at the UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies. The Project highlights the ways that libraries and artists can work together and features: Visual artists, performing artists, and writers who use libraries in their communities for inspiration, information, and as gallery space Collections, libraries and library staff that incubate the arts, and the ways that artists can use them effectively Free-to-share resources for librarians looking to incubate the arts at their libraries Ideas for artists looking to connect with their communities through library programming
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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Situating Occupy | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters
It only makes sense then that the World Revolution of 2011 should have begun as a rebellion against US client states, in much the same way as the rebellions that brought down Soviet power began in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia. The wave of rebellion soon spread across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Southern Europe, and then, much more uncertainly at first, across the Atlantic to New York. But once it had, in a matter of weeks it had exploded everywhere. At this point it’s extremely difficult to predict how far all this will ultimately go. Truly historical events, after all, consist of precisely those moments that could not have been predicted beforehand. Could we be in the presence of a fundamental shift like 1789 – a shift not only in global power relations but in our elementary political common sense? It’s impossible to say, but there are reasons to be optimistic.
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The Weekend Interview with David Gelernter: Rethinking the Digital Future – WSJ.com
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“Replication—The confirmation of results and conclusions from one study obtained independently in another—is considered the scientific gold standard. New tools and technologies, massive amounts of data, long-term studies, interdisciplinary approaches, and the complexity of the questions being asked are complicating replication efforts, as are increased pressures on scientists to advance their research. The five Perspectives in this section (and associated News and Careers stories, Readers’ Poll, and Editorial) explore some of the issues associated with replicating results across various fields. “
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Why Occupy? – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic
“Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa handled the eviction of Occupy LA with one thousand police officers. One thousand! There might have been less violence Tuesday night, but Occupy’s message (which was also Villaraigosa’s) still got sent: overwhelming force will be brought against political dissent. So, why occupy? The point is not to hold a city park. The point is to dramatize the struggle of weak against strong, which is also the struggle of poor against rich. If the dominant theme of the occupations is, as Jay Rosen succinctly put it, “public policy favors the rich,” then having the public police arrest the weak becomes a powerful metaphor for the message of the movement.”
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“Scientists in the field of social psychology must explore what they can do to prevent fraud in the future. Greater transparency with data, including depositing data in repositories where they can be accessed by other scientists (as is done in some other fields), might have sped up detection of this fraud, and it would certainly make researchers more careful about the analyses that they publish.”
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“Go to any social gathering in your neighborhood and you will notice that people interact mostly with others who are similar in terms of age, gender, race, attributes, and behaviors. This tendency of people to have similar friends—known as homophily—is one of the most pervasive features of social networks (1). A key question is how much of the homophily in behavior can be attributed to social diffusion, that is, direct causal influence of one person on another through social ties (2, 3). Results from two clever Internet experiments reported by Centola last year (4) and on page 1269 of this issue (5) shed light on how the particular arrangement of social ties promotes social diffusion.”
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Better Data for a Better Internet
“Decisions about when and how to regulate activities online will have a profound societal impact. Debates underlying such decisions touch upon fundamental problems related to economics, free expression, and privacy. Their outcomes will influence the structure of the Internet, how data can flow across it, and who will pay to build and maintain it. Most striking about these debates are the paucity of data available to guide policy and the extent to which policy-makers ignore the good data we do have.”
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World building 101 – Charlie’s Diary
“I propose that worldbuilding is the primary distinguishing characteristic of SF and fantasy (at least at a superficial level). Get the worldbuilding wrong, and your readers won’t be able to get a grip on the story line or the motivation of your characters. Or worse — they’ll get a grip, and realize that your story is, at best, a western or an age-of-sail yarn with the serial numbers filed off: that the trappings of the fantastic are only there to add a spurious sense of exoticism to an everyday tale. “
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The Performativity of Networks – Kieran Healy
“The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis in quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions; I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies.”
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Social Structures « Code and Culture
Comments on Social Structures by John Levi Martin.
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U.S. Intellectual History: Book Review: O’Connor on Kazin’s *American Dreamers*
“American Dreamers provides a welcome corrective to this tendency. Perfect for use with undergrads, it is a compact, readable overview of the history of the American left. Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement lies in imposing order on an otherwise unruly subject. Its seven chapters do not merely move forward in time, but instead concentrate on the movements that most clearly embodied leftist aspirations at a given moment. In successive chapters, Kazin explains, analyzes and criticizes abolitionism, suffragism, the trade union movement, Populism, socialism, communism and the New Left, concluding with the fragments of a contemporary left represented by such disparate figures as Naomi Klein, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky.”
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U.S. Intellectual History: Book Review: Hartman on Rodgers, *Age of Fracture*
“In addition to ambiguity, Age of Fracture exudes ambivalence, a moral position neither for nor against our age. Like the modernists, Rodgers sees no point pretending we can go back to the way it was. But like the antimodernists, Rodgers is unsettled by the present condition.”
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“R. W. White (1959) proposed that certain motives, such as curiosity, autonomy, and play (called intrinsic motives, or IMs), have common characteristics that distinguish them from drives. The evidence that mastery is common to IMs is anecdotal, not scientific. The assertion that “intrinsic enjoyment” is common to IMs exaggerates the significance of pleasure in human motivation and expresses the hedonistic fallacy of confusing consequence for cause. Nothing has been shown scientifically to be common to IMs that differentiates them from drives. An empirically testable theory of 16 basic desires is put forth based on psychometric research and subsequent behavior validation. The desires are largely unrelated to each other and may have different evolutionary histories. “
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The Wisdom of Motivated Crowds | FLOSSE Posse
“We must therefore find another criterion, which I think is the motivated crowds. People who work on Wikipedia … are not the indiscriminate crowd [but] are the part of the crowd who feels motivated to work with Wikipedia. Here it is: I’d replace the theory of the “wisdom of the crowd” with the theory of the “wisdom of the motivated crowds.” The general crowd says we should not pay taxes; the motivated crowd says that it’s fair to pay them. In fact, it’s not the ditch diggers or illiterates who contribute to Wikipedia, but people who already belong to a cultural crowd for the very fact they’re using a computer.”
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“Read & Trust is committed to gathering together the best independent writers available—the ones recommended by the writers you read and trust. “
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The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face | NeuroTribes
“Kare’s work gave the Mac a visual lexicon that was universally inviting and intuitive. Instead of thinking of each image as a tiny illustration of a real object, she aimed to design icons that were as instantly comprehensible as traffic signs.”
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Phil Yaffe thinks that the 7 percent rule is a pernicious myth. He debunks the notion that in an oral presentation, what you say is considerably less important than how you say it. He rejects the claim that content accounts for only 7 percent of the success of the presentation, while 93 percent of success is attributable to non-verbal factors, i.e. body language and vocal variety. The myth arises from a gross misinterpretation of a scientific experiment. It needs to be put to rest both for the benefit of presenters and the sake of scientific integrity.
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Keyboard Maestro 5.0.3: Work Faster with Macros for Mac OS X
Keyboard Maestro is a powerful macro program for Mac OS X Lion and Snow Leopard which has received glowing reviews.
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OpenScientist: Finalizing a Definition of “Citizen Science” and “Citizen Scientists”
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Landsat in Memory of the World Register : Image of the Day
What do the Gutenberg Bible, Tolstoy’s personal library, the Book of Kells—an 8th century illuminated manuscript, created by Celtic monks—and the Landsat Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) data archive have in common? They are all among the 245 international documentary collections that make up the Memory of the World Register. The register is a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) effort to preserve access to documentary heritage around the world.
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Encyclopedia – Custom | Economic History Services
“The EH.Net Encyclopedia of Economic and Business History is designed to provide students and laymen with high quality reference articles in the field. Articles for the Online Encyclopedia are written by experts, screened by a group of authorities, and carefully edited. A distinguished Advisory Board recommends entry topics, assists in the selection of authors, and defines the project’s scope.”
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It is well known that people movement exhibits a high degree of repetition since people visit regular places and make regular contacts for their daily activities. This paper1 presents a novel framework named Jyotish,2 which constructs a predictive model by exploiting the regularity of people movement found in the real joint Wifi/Bluetooth trace. The constructed model is able to answer three fundamental questions: (1) where the person will stay, (2) how long she will stay at the location, and (3) who she will meet. In order to construct the predictive model, Jyotish includes an efficient clustering algorithm to cluster Wifi access point information in the Wifi trace into locations. Then, we construct a Naive Bayesian classifier to assign these locations to records in the Bluetooth trace and obtain a fine granularity of people movement. Next, the fine grain movement trace is used to construct the predictive model including location predictor, stay duration predictor, and contact predictor to provide answers for three questions above. Finally, we evaluate the constructed predictive model over the real Wifi/Bluetooth trace collected by 50 participants in University of Illinois campus from March to August 2010. Evaluation results show that Jyotish successfully constructs a predictive model, which provides a considerably high prediction accuracy of people movement.
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The OSP Collection provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. Computational physics and computer modeling provide students with new ways to understand, describe, explain, and predict physical phenomena.
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The experimental effectiveness of mathematical proof
Link to PDF preprint.
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[1008.4831] Foundations of Inference
We present a foundation for inference that unites and significantly extends the approaches of Kolmogorov and Cox. Our approach is based on quantifying finite lattices of logical statements in a way that satisfies general lattice symmetries. With other applications in mind, our derivations assume minimal symmetries, relying on neither complementarity nor continuity or differentiability. Each relevant symmetry corresponds to an axiom of quantification, and these axioms are used to derive a unique set of rules governing quantification of the lattice. These rules form the familiar probability calculus. We also derive a unique quantification of divergence and information. Taken together these results form a simple and clear foundation for the quantification of inference.
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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The Umbrella Man – Video Library – The New York Times
“in historical research there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on…there’s this other level where everything is really weird.” Short doc by Erroll Morris on the “umbrella man” at the JFK assassination.
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Art and authenticity: The importance of originals in judgments of value. – PsycNET – Display Record
“Why are original artworks valued more than identical duplicates? The present studies explore 2 mechanisms underlying the special value of original artwork: the assessment of the art object as a unique creative act (performance) and the degree of physical contact with the original artist (contagion). Across 5 experiments, participants were exposed to hypothetical scenarios in which an original object was duplicated. The type of object varied across experiments (e.g., a painting vs. a piece of furniture) as did the circumstances surrounding the creation of the original object and the duplicate. Overall, the results support assessments of performance and contagion as key factors underlying the value of original artwork, and they are consistent with the conclusion that the discrepancy in value between original artworks and perfect duplicates derives from people’s lay theories about the domain of art, rather than from associations with particular kinds of art or certain cases of forgery.”
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danah boyd | apophenia » Debating Privacy in a Networked World for the WSJ
“I think that positioning privacy and public-ness in opposition is a false dichotomy. People want privacy *and* they want to be able to participate in public. This is why I think it’s important to emphasize that privacy is not about controlling information, but about having agency and the ability to control a social situation. People want to share and they gain a lot from sharing. But that’s different than saying that people want to be exposed by others. Agency matters. “
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Insights from Orthodox spirituality on technology | Faith and Technology
“My wondering was rewarded by this excerpt from Spiritual Instruction and Discourses, Vol I: The Authentic Seal by Archimandrite Aimilianos: “Orthodox Spirituality and the Technological Revolution” He argues that there isn’t anything essentially different about today’s technology, in its effect on our spiritual life, than there ever has been. Technology per se is not the problem. Rather it is the “absence of accountability in the way in which technology is administered and exploited.” “
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Daily Kos: Occupy poster art joins lineage of resistance messages
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Fairleigh Dickinson PublicMind Poll Shows Fox News Viewers Less Informed on Major News Stories
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The Moral Power of an Image: UC Davis Reactions – James Fallows – National – The Atlantic
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“This paper addresses the economic returns on tertiary degrees obtained in ages above 30 for individuals with upper-secondary schooling in light of current ideas on lifelong learning. Sweden is a case in point: Swedish tertiary education is open to older students, and labor market legislation supports employees who take a leave to study. The longitudinal data used for this analysis is based on annual population level registers from 1981 to 2007. Matching techniques are combined with fixed effect estimation to account for non-random selection. Late degrees were found to increase the employment rate by 18 percentage points and earnings while employed by 12 percent, which indicates strong employment effects and small effects on earnings while employed. The effects were absent in the higher parts of the earnings distribution, and females gained more than men. The estimated effects are largely stable across periods within a birth cohort.”
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Witnesses’ Recordings Help Investigators Explain Air Accidents – NYTimes.com
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Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps.
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UC Davis Pepper-Spray Incident Reveals Weakness Up Top | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
How strong can anyone defending those causes be? These people are weak and pathetic, and they’re getting weaker. And boy, are they showing it. Way to gear up with combat helmets and the submachine guns, fellas, to take on a bunch of co-eds sitting Indian-style. Maybe after work you can go break up a game of Duck-Duck-Goose at the local Chuck E Cheese. I’d bring the APC for that one. Bravo to those kids who hung in there and took it. And bravo for standing up and showing everyone what real strength is. There is no strength without principle. You have it. They lost it. It’s as simple as that.
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Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Ms. Civil Society v. Mr. Unaccountable | TomDispatch
As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream. A year ago, no one imagined an Arab Spring, and no one imagined this American Fall — even the people who began planning for it this summer. We don’t know what’s coming next, and that’s the good news. My advice is just of the most general sort: Dream big. Occupy your hopes. Talk to strangers. Live in public. Don’t stop now. I’m sure of one thing: there are a lot more flowers coming.
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David Frum on the GOP’s Lost Sense of Reality — New York Magazine
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Debunking Economics: An Interview with Steve Keen – Part II « naked capitalism
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Dissent Magazine – Summer 2011 Issue – Iron Horse and Gilded …
One mystery haunts White throughout his book: how clever but not very talented men were able in nineteenth-century America to amass large fortunes and power even as their capitalist enterprises failed and engulfed large numbers of Americans in economic crisis. After reading White’s book, I am haunted by a different mystery: why the popular resistance that took shape during the First Gilded Age has been so absent from the Second. To the extent to which populist fury has surfaced in our own time, it is concentrated on the right, in the Tea Party and allied organizations. The disastrous 2010 BP oil spill generated no lasting anti-corporate sentiment, not even in Louisiana, once the dominion of “Share the Wealth” populist Huey Long. No new Debs or William Jennings Bryan has emerged even now, more than twenty-five years into this Gilded Age. The aversion of historians to reckoning with capitalism turns out to be the ruling idea of our age. No one, it seems, has escaped capitalism’s influence. Perhaps the labor stirrings in Wisconsin, and White’s remarkable attempt to resurrect the spirit of the First Gilded Age, are signs that something new is afoot.