"Each of us contains roughly 10 times as many microbial cells as human ones. And while some microbes make us sick, many play vital roles in our physiology. They give us the ability to digest foods whose nutrients would otherwise be lost to us, and they make essential vitamins and amino acids our bodies can't. And yet, because the vast majority of these microbes die when extracted from their native habitat, they have been impossible to study and have remained a mystery…"

"Ryan Harc says that his Pocket Light concept will let us share “the blissful moments with your beloved. Draw out a little light which can be the best conveyor of your feeling.” Wink wink. I wish this was a real product; it’s just so nice to look at. And practical. And so nice to look at. So nice."

"The traffic signals didn’t stop working. They continued, but they no longer changed the time spent “green” in each direction based on time, and they no longer coordinated their “green” cycles along the main corridors:…"

"During Halloween, time-released curses are always loosed. A time-released curse is a period that has been set aside to release demonic activity and to ensnare souls in great measure … During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches."

"A Sensitivity Tuner: To avoid being limited to the sensitivity of the promoter and in order to be able to detect distinct concentrations of an inducer using just one promoter, we see the need for a set of sensitivity tuners. These devices allow you to "tune" your biosensor, such that it reports meaningful concentrations of the inducer appropriate to the biosensor's application. The sensitivity tuner also modifies the PoPS output from the promoter's native behavior to a sigmoidal "on" or "off" response pattern."

"This page reports the result of the iGEM competition for 2009. You can visit the team's wiki by clicking on the team's name. You can see what medal the team won and view the slides from their presentation, a video of their presentation, and their poster using the other icons."

"Winston Churchill once said, "Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together- what do you get? The sum of all fears." If you collect a group of commentators, just like any Sunday morning news show, you will hear the sum of their fears, all the reasons why not."

"That said, the internet is pretty vast, and some of its denizens are smarter than others… and I suspect Wragge and Co’s fees for hunting down anonymous commenters will reflect those realities. It also remains to be seen how much they can achieve when working on sites hosted in countries where the jurisdiction isn’t so clear-cut, or sites like Wikileaks which are geared toward protecting their sources. What we can be sure of is that when lawyers can see a paycheck, there’s dirty laundry waiting to be washed… and we can expect the corporate (and political) world to wise up to the web pretty fast now that the full extent of its power is becoming apparent."

"Tough times call for tough cases and that's where the recession case comes in! The recession case lets you keep cash in your pocket without sacrificing on unique design for your beloved iPhone! But just in case one isn't enough we have the BAILOUT BUNDLE – 10 cases for $7.99 or the STIMULUS PACKAGE – 30 cases for $14.99!"

"The 2010 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering & Technology (fPET-2010) is an outgrowth of the Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering (WPE-2007 in Delft and WPE-2008 in London). The mission of the Forum is (1) to encourage reflection on engineering, engineers, and technology by philosophers and engineers alike and (2) to build bridges between existing organizations of philosophers and of engineers. fPET-2010 will be held as an intensive one-day meeting on 9-10 May 2010 (Sunday evening-Monday) at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO."

"I guess that's what's kind of disappointing to me about Fama's post. I'm thrilled that he's read my book, and is saying halfway nice things about it in public. In general, I'm a big Fama fan—his willingness to keep testing his theories against the evidence, and to support the work of students and younger professors whose research undermined those theories, is hugely admirable. But he and a lot of other people in academic finance just don't seem interested in directly engaging in many of the most interesting questions raised by the financial crisis. Such as: Can the financial sector get too big, and if so how can we tell? Can derivatives markets concentrate risk as well as spread it? Is financial innovation fundamentally different and more dangerous than innovation in other fields, and if so what should we do about it? Should central banks and financial regulators try to snuff out asset-price bubbles, and if so how should they go about determining when we're in bubble territory?…"

"His startup recently got sued for patent infringement by a company that independently developed a product that performs a vaguely similar function. This other company's product is much less sophisticated, and their user-facing site is an ugly, user-hostile pile of crap. The term "search arbitrage" would be a kind word to apply to this other company's product. And there is absolutely no sense in which my friend's work builds on any of this other company's technology.

Now, my friend and his partner have consulted multiple IP lawyers and they've said, "Yep, the law is probably on your side." They have also said, "You're still screwed." The trial would take forever, the legal fees would be ruinous, and in the meantime nobody will invest in a company which has a litigation cloud hanging over it."

"It makes a huge difference who can say "take it or leave it" in a negotiation. Right now publishers tend to hold that privileged position. But as prices and cancellations keep rising, the positions are reversing. Even apart from the average balance of bargaining power, slowly shifting to universities, there is the bargaining power over specific titles. The desirability of journals is a matter of degree, despite the binary sound of "must-have". Some high-demand journals may be unthreatened by all recent developments. But the set of unthreatened journals is shrinking, and set for which universities could modify basic terms to better serve research and researchers is growing. For a growing number of journals overall, universities could cancel, threaten to cancel, or bargain effectively, if they wanted to. "

"What Olson shows in the book is that although all parties in a group may strongly desire and benefit from a particular collective good (e.g., a stable climate), under many circumstances they will not take individual action to achieve that collective good. In particular, they often find it in their individual best interest to act against their collective interest. The book has a penetrating analysis of what conditions can cause individual and collective interests to be aligned, and what causes them to be out of alignement."

"Such deliberate cluelessness and misrepresentation – it’s unfortunate the U.S. News & World Report will publish nonsense generated by someone who’s clearly only using half a brain."

"Causal state reconstruction has an important advan- tage over VLMM methods. Each state in a VLMM is represented by a single suffix, and consists of all and only the histories ending in that suffix. For many pro- cesses, the causal states contain multiple suffixes. In these cases, multiple “contexts” are needed to repre- sent a single causal state, so VLMMs are generally more complicated than the HMMs we build. The causal state model is the same as the minimal VLMM if and only if every causal state contains a single suffix. This is the case for the process in Fig. 3, where CSSR and VLMM methods will give the same results."

"And now, not surprisingly, they refer to him and his family as insects — "unwelcome creatures" infesting the White House that require quick and absolute extermination so that the natural order of things can be restored.

Newsmax should be wary of printing this kind of crap right now, given that just a few weeks ago they rushed, uncharacteristically red-faced, to take down a post which seemed to advocate a military coup against the president of the United States. I'd have to assume its only Pat Boone's status as a walking punchline that's leading them to leave his own bit of eliminationist wishful thinking up on their site for the moment. Regardless of who says it, though, it's wrong to beat the drum this loudly against a sitting president, to show the office — not simply the man and his family, but the office — so little respect. "

"“We have this very strange situation today in America where we have given banks hundreds of billions of dollars and the president has to beg the banks to lend and they refuse,” Stiglitz said. “What we did was the wrong thing. It has weakened the economy and has increased our deficit, making it more difficult for the future.”"

"Take the example of higher-education teaching, where deprofessionalization has meant that persons who need a reasonable return on education (ie, they work to live) increasingly leave faculty work to those who have another source of income. This means that campus employers sort for persons who can subsidize themselves, or find a corporate sponsor.

Even from a straight-up liberal perspective, this has major harms, advantaging corporate-driven curiousity–see Washburn.

Similarly, turning college teaching (back) into philanthropy functions as a significant economic discrimination that, in the U.S. also works to segment campus labor by gender, ethnicity, and age. In turn, this affects student learning, and the nature and quality of research."

"System disruption leverages network structure and dynamics to turn small attacks into large events. Selection of the best point to attack is based on an analysis of the network's design and flows. The term to describe this point is: the systempunkt. Essentially, the systempunkt is the point in the network, that if attacked, will yield the maximal possible impact."

"If we dealt with the pincer movement of lower state aid and higher enrollments by imposing admissions standards — say, by refusing to do remediation anymore — the economics (and prestige) of the operation would take off. Blocking developmental students would, all by itself, result in a wealthier student body. We would have much higher retention, graduation, and transfer rates. We would have much less call for special services for students with severe learning disabilities. Our financial aid spending would drop dramatically, as would our spending on tutoring. We'd run proportionally more sophomore-level classes, to the understandable delight of the faculty. As our graduation and transfer rates went up, our standing as a college of first choice would go with it. And we could both impress our politicians and insulate ourselves from them, just like the University of Michigan has. "

"We plot explicit support for allowing same-sex marriage broken down by state and by age. Seven states cross the 50% mark overall as of our current estimates, but the generation gap is huge. If policy were set by state-by-state majorities of those 65 or older, none would allow same-sex marriage. If policy were set by those under 30, only 12 states would not allow-same-sex marriage."

"Zimpl is a little language to translate the mathematical model of a problem into a linear or (mixed-) integer mathematical program expressed in .lp or .mps file format which can be read and (hopefully) solved by a LP or MIP solver."

"Consider the following optimization problem: we are given n jobs, a time horizon T, and one machine M with processing capacity Cap >= 2. Each job has a processing time (pj), release date (rj), due date (dj), machine utilization (cj), and weight (wj). We would like to schedule all the jobs on machine M while making sure that: (i) all jobs obey their execution window [rj,dj] (to a certain extent; see possible objectives), and (ii) we respect the machine capacity at all times (i.e., given a time 0 <= t <= T, the sum of cj over all jobs running at time t is always less than or equal to Cap). Possible objective functions are: minimize makespan, minimize total (weighted) tardiness, minimize total number of late jobs, minimize total (weighted) delay, etc."

"Our reports reviewed, systematically, 13 models of learning styles and concluded that this area of research is theoretically incoherent and conceptually confused. I listed in the reports 30 dichotomies, such as “activists” versus “reflectors”, “globalists” versus “analysts”, and “left brainers” versus “right brainers”. We should stop using these terms. There’s no scientific justification for them. You can check that. Shake your head gently. Does the left hemisphere of your brain move independently from the right? Or do they seem connected?"

"There is no required textbook for this class; I will post electronic copies of relevant papers to this web site as the course progresses. Meanwhile, here is a list of background references, primarily surveys and textbooks. Key references for the course are hilighted. Many of the other references focus on material that we will not cover at all in the course; I include them primarily to give some sense of the diversity of the field."

"Well, those copyright assertions are back, this time by the Attorney General, who asserted ownership over the (for real!) Attorney General's Public Record and Public Meeting Manual. I spent last week in Oregon meeting with law school faculty and giving lectures at 3 universities on the topic of who owns the law."

"Rather like a huge block of Post-Its, the Paper Chair's sheets can be scribbled on and removed during phone-call doodling; another cool features is that, since the block is not laminated together, magazines or newspapers can be stuffed between the sheets of paper like a bookmark. Just don't stuff a document in there, or good luck finding it again."

"In case you wondered about what we in the US pay for health care compared with those unfree unfortunates who suffer under various forms of socialized medicine, here are some graphs showing the advantages of what Republicans here tell us is “the best health care system in the world.”"

"However, if this is not done immediately, my group of startup CEOs and angel investors will begin targeting specific groups for elimination.
We will launch competing, fee-free events directly opposite your events. We will encourage angels investors, service providers and startups to boycott your events. You may even find our street teams outside your events handing out flyers.

This isn’t a joke and this is a threat: stop charging startup companies to present or we will do everything we can to put you out of business with a competing, free option."

"According to Mental Floss Magazine, Kennedy managed to work all of the Ku Klux Klan's most secret recruiting and organizational practices into his 1940s radio serial, "Clan Of The Fiery Cross." And as a result, the Man Of Steel dealt a crushing blow to the racist organization:"

"While some of my comments next may seem critical, they absolutely are and meant to be."

"The thought of actually looking up who these people are, what they do, and why they might be visiting was excruciatingly boring, so I didn't do that. Instead, I looked at the distribution of first surname letters of the people who visited the White House, and then I compared that distribution to the actual frequency of the same first surname letters in the U.S. writ large."

"*I wonder what’ll happen to our civilization when people realize that financiers don’t really do very much for the privilege of mishandling all the money. They work extremely hard, don’t get me wrong — they just don’t allocate funds very effectively. Societies top-heavy with financiers are in visible, physical decline — empty houses, unhealthy populations, decaying bridges, hollowed-out industries, that sort of thing."

"Are you familiar with RSpec, new to Sinatra, and can’t get the two to cooperate? This article maybe of use to you. Alternatively, if you’re like me and you’re simply new to this universe all together, this article can certainly be of use."

"I left off last night moving into the guts of the application. The plan was to start BDDing with RSpec. It occurred to me, however, that I had no idea how to do it. Happily, Sinatra's testing documentation includes RSpec information."

"How fast is this going to happen? Well, Khan is already becoming famous. Last year CNN gave him airtime to explain the financial crisis. Why him, and not an economics Ph.D. type, you ask? Because he is understandable, and because some genius at CNN figured out that at least some of their viewers were able and willing to learn a little bit in order to understand what is going on."

"Since that interview Howard has written a memoir, The man who forgot how to read. While he was writing it, I met him on the street one day, and he said he was feeling a bit miffed because he had wanted to write a memoir about several aspects of his life, but his editor wanted "the stroke, the whole stroke, and nothing but the stroke." In the book he has sneaked in something of his very interesting life, as well as what happened in the aftermath of the stroke. Between them, Howard and those who read his externalized thoughts back to him have written a wonderfully insightful and engaging book."

"What I mean by this is that over enough trades, it should not matter that the historical sequence of trades does not match exactly the real-time sequence. Regardless, it is something to keep in mind when comparing historical backtested data to real-time."

"Shockingly crazy worldview, I hereby name you “Abstinence-only Web Education”.
Adding this: there is always this resentment of people in the Academy toward the term “real world” — as in what we teach them “in here” has to pertain to the real world “out there”. I sympathize with that resentment, and even commiserated about the inappropriateness of the term with a coworker a couple nights ago.
But it’s things like abstinence-only web education that make that term relevant and, yes, often a legitimate critique. It’s not everybody, true, but the belief of even a percentage in higher education that what we really need to do is get back to printed books to solve the information filter problem is evidence enough that we are insulated from the world outside the campus, and to a stunning degree."

"A comparison of features supported by different Google Wave solutions."

"An appendix sketches connections between these results and the replicator dynamics of evolutionary theory."

"The continued popularity of SSE among Republicans is doing serious damage to the economy. Last year’s tax rebate was wrongheaded and a complete waste of money that would have been better spent cleaning up the housing mess. I argued this case in another New York Times article, but the Bush administration’s obsession with tax cuts as the sole cure for every economic problem blinded it to alternative policies that might have nipped the housing problem in the bud and prevented the banking system from imploding."

"We’re very excited to announce the Public Terabyte Dataset project."

"The question should not be, “is Rails a safe choice,” but “[how long] can we justify the expense of traditional development approaches.”"

"Though one of our most ancient holidays, Halloween wasn’t celebrated widely in America until the latter part of the 1800s. Ypsilanti likely didn’t celebrate Halloween for half a century after the city’s founding in 1823—the quote above is the first Halloween story to appear in old newspapers dating back to the 1840s."

"So what happens next? >The House Financial Services Committee has refused to publish his testimony, offering “the dog ate my homework” level excuses, first that they hadn’t gotten it, then that it was in the wrong format, then that their IT department was experiencing difficulties (always a good one when real reasons are running thin). The last one was pure Catch-22: that he had gotten his written testimony in too late."

"It is common enough to look at debt as a percentage of GDP, DPI, etc. but that's so… impersonal. So here are a couple of (very scary) charts that look at things from a dollars per person perspective (click on charts to enlarge)."

"This specification defines an API that allows Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel to their main page. This allows for thread-like operation with message-passing as the coordination mechanism."

"In a CouchDB-enabled web, data-flows don't have to be centralized, which means friends can communicate without going through a fixed domain. This makes the web more efficient. It also means I can make data available to my social network without relying on 3rd-party services."

"The distinction matters, Harkinson argues, because the larger figure makes it appear that support for the Chamber’s positions—many of which Mother Jones opposes—is more broad-based than it really is. “The Chamber claims to speak for the U.S. business community,” he says, and the widespread use of the three million figure “certainly adds to” the impression that it does. But if many of those three million aren’t sustaining the Chamber financially or playing a role in setting its policies, how meaningful is the number? On Wednesday, Harkinson published an open letter to several reporters who had recently used the “three million” figure (sometimes with caveats or qualifiers), asking them to publish a correction."

"The reason the internet is such a home to wow business models is that it's easier to create a network here than any other time in history."

"On the outside it might appear that everybody who is not using Tool X is a moron. But speed & latency are only part of the picture. We already established that going from 5ms to 50ms might not even be noticeable by anyone using your product. The expense for speed can be multiple things:…"

"It's been too long since I've sat down to benchmark CouchDB. I'm working on the High Performance CouchDB chapter in the book, so I needed some numbers."

"Below is the same text rendered in HTML using the Fell Types revival fonts by Igino Marini with OpenType features enabled. Note the ‘ct’ ligature and the contextual form of the ‘s’:…"

"DFA is an innovative 501(c)(3) organization with a unique business model combining elements of a non-profit organization with those of a biotech company."

"Underneath the usual total unemployment numbers are the reasons an individual is unemployed: You are on temporary layoff; you quit your job; you have reentered the labor market and have yet to find a job; or you are entering the job market for the first time and have yet to find a job. Or, finally, you have been permanently separated from your previous employer, who has no expectation of hiring you back.

The last category is the dominant reason for unemployment at this time. That might not seem surprising, but it actually is. Never, in the six recessions preceding the latest one, did permanent separations account for more than 45 percent of the unemployed. The current percentage stands at 56 percent as of September and appears to be still climbing:…"

"The 2010 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering & Technology (fPET-2010) has issued its second call for papers (pdf here). fPET-2010 will be held 9-10 May 2010 (Sunday evening – Monday) at the Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Co. Organized by the Committee on Philosophy, Engineering & Technology, the event is held in cooperation with a number of organizations:…"

"Let’s make the other deliverable explicit: the team, and it’s growing capability.

I’m increasingly interested in the effect that social objects have on the way we work. There’s a growing body of research that demonstrates the ways in which our environment affects our behaviour[1]. The scrum picture has become a social object around which groups form – you see it in books, presentations, printed and stuck on walls, even (here at the Munich Scrum Gathering) on tattoos (the stick-on variety, though I wonder if any of the diehards has gone as far as making it permanent…). I worry about what happens when we surround ourselves with process pictures which (1) don’t include people, and (2) only tell half the story. As soon as we regard ourselves as “means” to some other group’s “ends”, or even worse to some process’s, we are disempowering ourselves (thanks to Ari Tikka in his Scan-Agile 2009 presentation for pointing this out)."

"This mystical belief in the magic of citation statis- tics can be found throughout the documentation for research assessment exercises, both national and in- stitutional. It can also be found in the work of those promoting the h-index and its variants."

"Now, as Jonathan Kohl would point out, many people marching behind the Agile banner do the same: they use Agile as another club with which to beat people. I’m less worried about Agile, though, because its base rhetoric is more explicitly humanist. Lean is more likely to be an attractive nuisance because the idea of driving out waste appeals to executives who find it less work to remove waste than to convert it into value—executives who get license to act sociopathic because they have a fiduciary duty to treat business as a machine for maximizing shareholder value, externalities be damned. I worry about Lean in a business culture where we are trained out of empathy for Lear, damned fool though he surely is."

Abstracts of the Workshop Philosophy & Engineering (2007)

Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering, 2008

"PMML uses XML to represent mining models. The structure of the models is described by an XML Schema. One or more mining models can be contained in a PMML document. A PMML document is an XML document with a root element of type PMML. The general structure of a PMML document is:…"

"The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) is a member driven organization that:

Supports the development of standards for cloud computing and frameworks for interoperating between clouds;
develops benchmarks for cloud computing;
supports reference implementations for cloud computing, preferably open source reference implementations;
manages a testbed for cloud computing called the Open Cloud Testbed;
sponsors workshops and other events related to cloud computing."

"The dashed circles above represent "forbidden regions" in which one of the angles would be obtuse. As Lindgren and Cassidy and Lord showed, eight triangles is best possible, and there exist alternate solutions with any even number of triangles larger than eight.

Recently, John Tromp added a new twist to the problem by asking on sci.math how to make the angles as acute as possible. For the eight-triangle solution, he found a placement of the vertices in which the maximum angle is only about 85 degrees, and asked if more triangles would achieve even better angles."

"WITH A FIVE PERCENT P MOTHERFUCKER"

"Calor licitantis: Bidder's heat, also known as auction fever. The term was coined in ancient Rome to define the sometimes-irrational behavior of bidders at auctions."

"Solving the current problems in science communication requires the intervention of strong companies such as Google. But it will take more than technical advances to provoke scientists into taking full advantage of the web. We need pressure, and perhaps compulsion, from journals and funders to raise publishing standards to the new level made possible by such tools. Google Wave may not be, indeed is probably not, the whole answer. But it points the way to tools that build records and reproducibility into every step. And that has to be good for science."

"PUT THAT PENCIL DOWN
Using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it's digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting."

"[Update: I should have added that perhaps the Chamber fully understands the difference between free markets and competitive markets, and simply wants to preserve the "freedom" to take advantage of customers.]"

"A look at another job market number, Macroblog: …At the end of August there were estimated to be fewer than 2.4 million job openings, equal to only 1.8 percent of the total filled and unfilled positions—a new record low. This is an especially significant issue given the large number of people who are looking for work. The ratio of the number of unemployed to the number of job openings was greater than 6 in August. In contrast, that ratio was under 1.5 in 2007 and previously peaked at 2.8 in mid-2003, suggesting that finding a job right now is extremely difficult…"

"The oldest thing Tony Garchinski, his mother, Yvonne or anyone else on the planet has ever touched fell with such force it cracked the windshield on the family's Nissan SUV, skidded across the hood and dented their garage door before landing on the ground, breaking into five fragments."

"So as my new years recommendation I would be happy if you can check out the website given above and join the idea of a clean code awareness."

"Deviating from society's average level of trust is costly only of the average level of trust is correct. Prior to the financial crisis, the level of trust was too high and more distrust than average would have been helpful in avoiding losses. Also, because the level of trust was too high, restoring trust to the blind faith level it was at before the crisis would be unwise. There wasn't enough fear and mistrust in financial markets as the bubble was inflating, and more skepticism and doubt than is appropriate. We need to rebuild trust, but even with an optimal regulatory response, we shouldn't go back to the same level of trust in complex financial products, ratings agencies, etc. that we had before."

"For a while i was interested to see how many of the rails developers i know, use macs. After talking about this urge of mine with the awesome @hakunin we have decided to collect a bunch of our colleagues desktop portraits. almost everyone is on a mac (duh!).

Foolishly, i forgot to notate some of the pictures people sent me with the name of the developer, so if you recognize yours and want to link the image/title to somewhere, lemme know."

"Bite-size Edits is an experiment in distributed and networked proofreading. We like to think of it as entertaining productive procrastination, all in the service of publishing books with no mistakes in them.

First, writers upload or post their text to Bite-size Edits. Then, the text snippets are served up to editors at random to proofread. Proofreaders fix any mistakes they find in the text, and can keep on checking following random chunks of text for as long as they like."

What I'll be doing in November

"The Agile Skills Project is a non-commercial resource that will establish a common baseline of the skills an Agile developer needs to have, including a shared vocabulary and understanding of fundamental practices. The Project intends to:

establish an evolving picture of the skills needed on Agile projects;
encourage life-long continuous learning;
establish a network of trust to help members find like-minded folk, and to identify new mentors in the community."

"ACTA has argued–quite convincingly and interestingly–that our accreditation system is badly broken, and has laid out a plan for repairing it. Among the recommendations: break the link between accreditation and federal financial aid. See ACTA's 2007 report, Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About it."

"Think about that for a second. Depth of field principles dictate that everything in the same focal plane will be in the same focus. This lens bends this rule literally by bending the light entering your camera, creating extreme spherical and chromatic distortions that you can control. What’s really cool is, similar to pinhole cameras and those of yesteryear, these lenses are completely analog. There is no communication going on between the lens and your camera. No focusing, no aperture control, no VER or any of that fancy stuff. In fact, the aperture can only be set by dropping a magnetic disk in front of the lens with holes cut out in various sizes. How cool is that?"

"I proposed that a network of carts and tiny kiosks be set up to give away Streetfood to anyone who asks."

"We’re happy to announce the release of the Arduino Mega, a larger, more powerful Arduino board. It’s based on the on the ATmega1280 (datasheet), which has 128 KB of Flash (program) memory, 8 KB of RAM, and 4 KB of EEPROM. The board has 54 digital pins (of which 14 provide PWM output), 16 analog inputs, 4 hardware serial ports, I2C, and all other goodness you expect from an Arduino board. The Mega is compatible with most shields designed for the Duemilanove, and includes the same automatic power selection, auto-reset on upload, and pre-burned bootloader."

"This document is a collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands and tasks which are useful for IT work or for advanced users. This is a practical guide with concise explanations, however the reader is supposed to know what s/he is doing.

Unix Toolbox revision 14.1
The latest version of this document can be found at http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml. Replace .xhtml on the link with .pdf for the PDF version and with .book.pdf for the booklet version. On a duplex printer the booklet will create a small book ready to bind. This XHTML page can be converted into a nice PDF document with a CSS3 compliant application (see the script example). See also the about page."

"Decisions: The first type of decisions is simple, “binary”, i.e. you just care if something is true or false. Very true or very false does not matter. Someone is either pregnant or not pregnant. A statement is “true” or “false” with some confidence interval. (I call these M0 as, more technically, they depend on the zeroth moment, namely just on probability of events, and not their magnitude —you just care about “raw” probability). A biological experiment in the laboratory or a bet with a friend about the outcome of a soccer game belong to this category.

The second type of decisions is more complex. You do not just care of the frequency—but of the impact as well, or, even more complex, some function of the impact. So there is another layer of uncertainty of impact. (I call these M1+, as they depend on higher moments of the distribution). When you invest you do not care how many times you make or lose, you care about the expectation…"

Be sure to look at the background and silhouetted wires in this shot. See the comment, "That's one of the most amazing collections of overhead wires I've ever seen on Shorpy. I'll bet that it has a lot to do with the business on the ground floor of our featured building."

"We like the fact that humans are social. It's good for society. And what they're doing online is fundamentally a mix of social grooming and maintaining peripheral social awareness. They want to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn't viable. They want to share their state of mind and status so that others who care about them feel connected. It's a back-and-forth that makes sense if only we didn't look down at it from outter space."

"OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world that anyone can edit. You can get the raw data for roads around the world, set up a server, design a new map style, and have your own personal online interactive maps. In the past, this has been difficult owing to the large volume of data required and the hassles of system administration. Tile Drawer is designed to make this process easy with a custom-configured Amazon EC2 machine image (AMI) that gets you up and running with just two pieces of information: a custom stylesheet that you choose, and the geographical location of a part of the world you'd like rendered."

"By AHIP's own admission, they have to be stopped or they'll kill again. The report is a taunt, a thug-level threat, terrorism, if you will. With no government alternative to corporate health insurance, it's like asking captured bank robbers if they'd mind not robbing banks anymore. When they say, "Yes, we mind," you ask if they'd stop shooting hostages. And when they say, "We'll think about it," you thank them for accepting their punishment so gracefully and release them."

"Use rvm . Easy installation and switching between available Ruby versions and runtimes, without messing up your current Ruby install! rvm also allows you to use multiple versions of ruby in separate terminals concurrently!"

"Every technology fits, in its own unique way, into a far-flung network of different sites of social practice. Some technologies are employed in a specific site, and in those cases we often feel that we can warrant clear cause-and-effect stories about the transformations that have accompanied them, either in that site or others. Other technologies are so ubiquitous — found contributing to the evolution of the activities and relationships of so many distinct sites of practice — that we have no idea how to begin reckoning their effects upon society, assuming that such a global notion of "effects" even makes sense."

"Efficient-market theory ought, with any methodological justice, to be relegated to the Museum of Nice Tries. But there is no unified replacement theory, and developing one will be arduous, involving empirical and theoretical work on all scales, from the experimental psychology of individual investors, through the institutional constraints under which money managers work, to solving for the aggregated effects of market participants’ interactions. In the meantime, efficient-market theory provides a ready basis for precise calculations, and one that is moreover now built into the academic field of finance and into the practice and even infrastructure of the markets."

"Made possible by an $8 million gift from the entrepreneurs for whom the program is named, the Rajendra and Neera Singh Program in Market and Social Systems Engineering, MKSE, will be the first course of study to fully integrate the disciplines needed in this emerging science. The intellectual core of the program will encompass network science, algorithmic game theory and other disciplines relevant to engineers and scientists as they consider human incentives and behavior in developing modern technological systems."

"Even eBay, with the most well-known example of public negative karma, doesn't represent how untrustworthy an actual seller might be-it only gives buyers reasons to take specific actions to protect themselves. In general, avoid negative public karma. If you really want to know who the bad guys are, keep the score separate and restrict it to internal use by moderation staff."

"Yesterday we analyzed some of the applications being built with Pachube, an open source platform enabling developers to connect sensor data to the Web. We at ReadWriteWeb think that Pachube is an excellent example of one of our Top 5 Trends of 2009: Internet of Things. So we're exploring Pachube in-depth in a 3-part series…."

"Today I met an extraordinary Iranian man in the Geneva airport. He's written a 1000 page book in Arabic about (at least in part) his experiences in Cyprus. He approached me, asked if my English was really really good, sat next to me, and started pulling out several pages of hand-wrtten uppercase English. He had me go over them, improve them, write some new text as he read his Arabic in halting English, told me exactly how he wanted it to sound, pressed me to find shorter ways to say things, and finally got me to write out (for his next helper, no doubt) a clean copy of all my work…."

"Ragel compiles executable finite state machines from regular languages. Ragel targets C, C++, Objective-C, D, Java and Ruby. Ragel state machines can not only recognize byte sequences as regular expression machines do, but can also execute code at arbitrary points in the recognition of a regular language. Code embedding is done using inline operators that do not disrupt the regular language syntax."

"Prezi is zooming sketches on a digital napkin.

It's visualization and storytelling without slides. Your ideas live on stage and on the web.

Have you ever wondered about presenting your thoughts as free as they come? Ever got tired of creating a slideshow? It's been said, that the best innovations come from people who are unhappy with the tools they use. We realized that our ideas won't fit into slides anymore. Putting together creative thinking and technology expertise, we have created Prezi, a living presentation tool."

"Many 401(k) investors last year bailed out of stocks, often the day after big market drops, Hewitt found, with nearly 20 percent of investors switching their assets — all getting out of stocks. This means they locked in losses, selling low after buying high during the run-up of previous years."

"The NY Times reports that architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder “have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as ‘visionary’ were planned but never built. The map is available as an interactive iPhone application…that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words. ‘It’s a wall-less museum where the art isn’t even there,’ Mr. Snyder said. ‘The juxtaposition of what could be against what is’.”"

"Today’s class in ENG 198, Introduction to the Missing Basics of Engineering (syllabus here), is covering engineering modeling in the lecture Engineering and Models: Hint – Real Engineers Use More than Just Equations."

"Thunderbirds says that science is awesome because you get to fly in space and live on a high-tech island full of booze. Beat that for incentive."

"One day the technology of electroactive polymers will drastically change the way we percieve products. Products will gain new dimensions ranging from changing tactile surfaces over active membranes to morphing shapes. Products of the future will be "alive". " via Bill Merrill

"Smart building blocks plus Microsoft's Surface interactive table-top computer have taken touch-screen interaction into the third dimension. Engineers or architects could use them to develop designs, or it could become a new kind of building toy."

"Here's a tongue-in-cheek geek celebration font for my friends at Clockwork.net and other code-jockeys who've been longing for a new monospace font. Programmers and others working in command-line terminal windows mostly use fixed-width, monospace fonts, because it makes lines of code clearer when viewed on screen. There's no tab feature in terminal windows, so when UNIX-geeks look at a directly listing in columns, the columns are formed by lots of space characters between them (not tabs). So the font they use to view these readouts needs to be monospaced, or else all the info comes out wavy, in crooked columns. So at the request of my friend Mr. Koppelman (lolife.com) I set out to create the world's greatest monospaced font. I failed a few times, then another friend suggested I make a sarcastic font…."

"Photosounder is a one-of-a-kind image-sound editing program. It is unique in that it opens images and sounds indiscriminately, treats and processes them as images, and synthesizes them as sounds. Sounds, once turned into images, can be powerfully modified to achieve effects and results that couldn't be obtained in any other way, while images of all sorts reveal the infinite kinds of otherworldly sounds they contain. Ultimately, knowing how sounds look and how images sound, you'll be able to create images that sound like what you want to hear, or like what you couldn't imagine to hear."

"Your third point, about the founders' vision of America, is something that has been a matter of keen interest to me most of my adult life. In fact, I even wrote a book about it, where I went back and read the founders' early writings about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. What a fascinating time to be alive! What astonishing minds! Here's what I learned: our whole system of government was based on the idea that the purpose of the state was to preserve individual liberties, not to dictate them. The founders uniformly despised many practices in England that compromised matters of individual conscience by restricting freedom of speech. Freedom of speech – the right to talk, write, publish, discuss – was so important to the founders that it was the first amendment to the Constitution – and without it, the Constitution never would have been ratified."

"The Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR**, or simply COIN) project is an initiative to spur the development of open-source software for the operations research community."

"When modeled in the AMPL modeling language, optimization problems may be examined by a set of tools found in the AMPL Library. Dr. Ampl is a meta solver which, by use of the AMPL Library, dissects such models, obtains statistics on their data, is able to symbolically prove or numerically disprove convexity of the functions involved and provides aid in the decision for an appropriate solver. A problem is associated with a number of appropriate solvers available on the NEOS Server for Optimization by means of relational database."

"The skyline problem is to compute the best tuples from a set of ordered d-tuples. The name is originated from what the solution represented on 2d plane resembles the scene that urban buildings comprise. Skyline is one of the recommendation queries, and it is considering multi criteria. It is very interesting problem as well as very useful query. This problem has been being intensively studied for recent years. Today, I’m going to present the problem definition of skyline. Next time, I’ll describe several algorithms for the skyline problem."

"A synchronizing word w for a given synchronizing DFA is called minimal if no proper prefix or suffix of w is synchronizing. We characterize the class of synchronizing automata having finite language of minimal synchronizing words (such automata are called finitely generated). Using this characterization we prove that any such automaton possesses a synchronizing word of length at most 3n ¿ 5. We also prove that checking whether a given DFA $\mathcal{A}$ is finitely generated is co-NP-hard, and provide an algorithm for this problem which is exponential in the number of states $\mathcal{A}.$"

"Many GECCO papers discuss lessons learned in a particular application, but few papers discuss lessons learned over an ensemble of problem areas. A scan of the tables of contents of the Proceedings from GECCO 2005 and 2006 showed no paper title stressing lessons learned although the term "pitfall" appeared occasionally in abstracts, typically applying to a particular practice. We present in this paper a set of broadly applicable "lessons learned" in the application of evolutionary computing (EC) techniques to a variety of problem areas and present advice related to encoding, running, monitoring, and managing an evolutionary computing task."

"The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext."

"If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience."

"Orchestra provides an instrumentation API for Ruby."