"Most machine learning researchers perform quantitative experiments to estimate generalization error and compare the performance of different algorithms (in particular, their proposed algorithm). In order to be able to draw statistically convincing conclusions, it is important to estimate the uncertainty of such estimates. This paper studies the very commonly used K-fold cross-validation estimator of generalization performance. The main theorem shows that there exists no universal (valid under all distributions) unbiased estimator of the variance of K-fold cross-validation."

"A framework to allow Ruby applications to generate file/folder stubs (like the rails command does for Ruby on Rails, and the ‘script/generate’ command within a Rails application during development)."

"It’s only natural that you’re asking how the hell we wound up in this mess. Why did a bubble inflate in commercial real estate? Why are smaller banks so disproportionately exposed? What caused this catastrophe?

Fortunately, we figured it out for you."

I would like to suggest a Workantile Exchange Faceball league.

"It’s Thanksgiving, and we’re very thankful for the continuing kind words and terrific support you all have shown us this year.

We know it’s been a tough year for a lot of folks out there. So we’d like to help. Before the madness of retail’s Black Friday hits, with all kind of crazy “get up at 4am to get in line” sales, we have a much simpler alternative for you.

40% off all our titles. Now through Wed Nov 25. Just use the coupon code PRAGTHANKS40 when checking out. Please note that orders placed on or after Tuesday may not get shipped until Monday, November 30, as our shipping facilities will be closed for the holiday. So order now, and stock up for some dynamite holiday reading. Feel free to use the coupon as many times as you need to before it expires, and pass it on to your friends and relatives."

"How to create your first Personal Kanban and visualize your work."

"PR is about managing media and analyst relations. A good PR company helps manage messaging and positioning targeted at the media. PR should generate interest from relevant trade magazines, blogs, editors, award bodies, analysts, etc. The goal is increase knowledge of your company and products among customers, industry experts, investors, etc. Specific PR campaigns should have more concrete objectives."

"Marketing feels daunting because you are being shown a dozen yellow brick roads that weave off gloriously into the colorful horizon. That and the promise that the chosen path is flowering with ROI poppies. Walk forward in your customer’s shoes from before purchase; from pre-realization. How do you get to you?"

"The current global financial crisis, visibly catalyzed by the rapid drop in securitized mortgage valuations in the summer 2007, has entailed a dramatic decrease in the availability of credit, wealth destruction linked to stock market valuations, the failure of banks and insurance companies, numerous other bankruptcies, the growth of governmental intervention, a deep and protracted recession, and a general rise in the uncertainty of Capitalistic institutions. It is in unsettled times such as these that hegemonic and taken-for-granted ideas and institutions may be challenged, and new alternatives cultivated. In the context of the early 21st century, it is the hegemonic ideals of markets, market-based solutions, and the ideology of neoliberalism that is on trial."

"The majority of Council voted against the Anglin – Briere resolution to publish the Council meeting emails. The Council majority have said that if this is important to the citizens of Ann Arbor let them pay for it and do the work the Council claims is so expensive.
We ask your help in obtaining the information. There will be some minor expense but if shared by many it should not be prohibitive. The typical charge so far has been less than $3.00 per meeting for the requests.
because many sites will host material without charge, we believe our group can make the information publicly available at very little cost. In any case we can have some fun and a learning experience."

"Extensive research has been done to analyze the phenomenon of open source software development from various perspectives. By contrast little is known about open source development of tangible objects, so–called open design, so far. Until recently, limitations to the availability of successful empirical examples of this ‘new innovation model’ outside software may have been a key reason for this gap.

This paper contributes to the literature on the open source mode of product development by providing a quantitative study (N = 85) of open design projects. Our goal is to explore the landscape of open source development in the world of atoms, to analyze project characteristics, structures, and success, and to investigate similarities and dissimilarities to open source software development."

"What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, high usability, striking visual effects and all those "web 2.0" goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.

This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today's website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new personal ways of using the library."

"The core of this wonderful museum is the Reuleaux collection of mechanisms and machines, a set of 19th century models built to demonstrate the elements of machine motion (more collections here). Also of interest are the tutorials and this extensive list of online references."

"Think back to the dot-com era, when venture capitalists were spending all their money laying fiber-optic cable under the street. The right solution wasn’t for the Fed to raise interest rates until even punch-drunk venture capitalists could realize all this investment in fiber wouldn’t be profitable. The right solution was to take their money away. Give it to the poor, who will spend it on something useful, like food and clothing.

So those are Keynes’ prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that’s kind of what we did. The results were magical: the economy grew strongly, inequality fell away, everyone had jobs."

"People forget what the markets were like in the late 1970's when the pits were dead and the average person wanted nothing to do with the US equity markets. The creation of 401k's and more gambling tables like the options exchanges helped to perk things up. This latest generation of jokers will not stop until they have trashed the markets once again."

"We used to gasp at the way the Soviet Union stuck opponents of the regime in asylums. But the USSR is not the only country in history that has had a hard time seeing its adversaries as rational. The present generation of Americans is made uncomfortable by the idea that their country might have enemies whose enmity is the result of something other than fanaticism or mental illness. Maj Hasan’s colleagues, the Economist writes, say he thought the war on terror was a war on Islam. According to what we think Islam is, he is wrong. But according to a fundamentalist idea of what Islam is, he is right. There is rationality in such enmity, even if that rationality is built on different assumptions."

"Everybody else has to stay in Special Torture Jail forever on accounta they have all come down with Schrodinger's Guilt. If they stay in the box they might be guilty, but if we open the box they might not be."

"The i7 even represents a sizable (35%) performance increase over the i5 model and costs only $200 more. In fact, the i7 iMac benchmarks compare favorably to 2.93Ghz Quad-Core Mac Pro which costs significantly more."

"I can't tell you how bizarre it is to see arguments I used to hear coming from the mouths of Montana Freemen like LeRoy Schweitzer in the 1990s — arguments that led to him embarking on an 81-day armed standoff with federal authorities, and resulting in him spending the rest of his natural life in a federal prison — coming from supposedly mainstream talk-show hosts on Fox News only 13 years later."

"Unemployed per job posting in the top 50 U.S. metros."

"Pot does not kill anyone, and he would have been content to make that his substitute for the mood-altering he seemed to have to have. But he was compelled to give it up, and now he is dead.

This fine man was 49 years old and leaves behind a young widow, mother and hundreds of grieving friends. He was loved by many for his gentleness and many charitable endeavors."

"As noted on that page, we urge you to do two things. First, be aware that Apple is acting as a gatekeeper, and preventing you from getting the software that developers such as ourselves are trying to provide you. We wanted to ship a simple bug fix, and it took almost four months of slow replies, delays, and dithering by Apple. All the while, our buggy, and supposedly infringing version, was still available. There’s no other word for that but “broken”."

"Columbia University's Computer Vision Labaratory is testing out a product called the BigShot, a digital camera intended to be taken apart and assembled by children, in order to remind them that yeah, someone actually designed and built this thing."

"…We find that award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, both relative to their prior performance and relative to a matched sample of non-winning CEOs. At the same time, they extract more compensation following the awards, both in absolute amounts and relative to other top executives in their firms. They also spend more time on public and private activities outside their companies, such as assuming board seats or writing books. The incidence of earnings management increases after winning awards. The effects are strongest in firms with weak corporate governance. Our results suggest that the ex post consequences of media-induced superstar status for shareholders are negative."

"According to the Center for Responsible Lending, issuers are using the power they still have for a few months to implement “any time any reason” price changes to raise the interest rates for large groups of customers. "

"This isn't as simple as cutting out waste. The real project here is getting the medical system to define waste the same way consumers define waste: treatments that don't help people, and in fact hurt the bottom line. As it is, those treatments currently help the bottom line, and so are no more wasteful for the institution than a Best Buy salesman persuading you to buy an expensive HDMI cable you don't need."

"An even more striking thing, perhaps, emerges in this second graph, namely that revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All the blue bars in the chart above represent revenues that go directly to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen noticeably.) This is mostly because of live revenues, but also because of the growing amount collected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much bigger chunk of industry revenues than most people realise."

" The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler."

"From the discovery of the 1898 International Dictionary to linotyping the entries to printing the last print on the vandercook to cutting the fingertabs of the deluxe edition, this video gives a quick overview of the process of creating the Pictorial Webster's fine press edition."

"In October, 35.6 percent of unemployed persons were jobless for 27 weeks or more…."

"The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town's municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA's spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts)."

"The Ruby Development Center contains sample code, documentation, tools, and additional resources to help you build applications on Amazon Web Services."

"The Chamber has pulled out all the stops in its effort to silence the activists. First, it sent an improper copyright takedown notice to the Yes Men's upstream provider, demanding that a parody website posted in support of the action be removed immediately and resulting in the temporary shutdown of not only the spoof site but hundreds of other sites hosted by May First/People Link. Next, the Chamber filed suit against the activists in federal court, claiming among other things the activism infringed their trademarks."

"Not that anyone involved in these transactions is a war profiteer, mind you—they’re merely taking a lemon (the fall of the Berlin Wall) and learning how to make extremely profitable lemonade (the first Gulf War)."

"What that means is web designers can get easy access to creative fonts without having to spend the time preparing images or Flash files to render them, ideally resulting in time and cost savings in the design stage. It should also provide a more lightweight experience for your web server, because it won’t have to serve up the comparatively heavyweight image or Flash files to render a variety of design-quality fonts."

"Riddle me this, Batman: If you put Linux on your Windows XP computer, is it now a new computer, a new machine? Take a look. Nope. Same old dent on the bottom, same stickers next to the keyboard. Latch is loose. Duh. Same machine."

"16 But when the sons of these men received the same position of authority from their fathers-having had no experience of misfortunes, and none at all of civil equality and freedom of speech, but having been bred up from the first under the shadow of their fathers’ authority and lofty position-some of them gave themselves up with passion to avarice and unscrupulous love of money, others to drinking and the boundless debaucheries which accompanies it, and others to the violation of women or the forcible appropriation of boys; and so they turned an aristocracy into an oligarchy. But it was not long before they roused in the minds of the people the same feelings as before; and their fall therefore was very like the disaster which befell the tyrants."

"Extrasolar planets are not named and are referred to only by their assigned scientific designation. The reason given by the IAU to not name the planets is that it is considered impractical as planets are expected to be common. I advance some reasons as to why this logic is flawed, and suggest names for the 403 extrasolar planet candidates known as of Oct 2009. The names follow a scheme of association with the constellation that the host star pertains to, and therefore are mostly drawn from Roman-Greek mythology. Other mythologies may also be used given that a suitable association is established."

"One of the discussants in Brain and Behavioral Sciences of Seth Roberts's article on self-experimentation was by Martin Voracek and Maryanne Fisher. They had a bunch of negative things to say about self-experimentation, but as a statistician, I was struck by their concern about "the overuse of the loess procedure." I think lowess (or loess) is just wonderful, and I don't know that I've ever seen it overused."

"This page contains links to some of the most useful free software and open-source software for operations research and industrial engineering."

"We can see the problem we face by looking at the continued silo-ization of instant messaging. Check out this list of instant messaging protocols. It’s a mess because so many of the commonly-used platforms are still, in 2009, private silos. Tweeting today is in many ways like instant messaging was when the only way you could do it was with AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and ICQ. All were silos, with little if any interoperabiity. With tweeting we do have interop, and that’s why tweeting has taken off while IM stays stagnant. XMPP helped a lot (it’s why you can see Google IMs in Adium, for example). But we don’t have NEA with Twitter, and that’s why tweeting is starting to stagnate, and developers like Dave are working on getting past it."

"Recovery.gov can’t bootstrap itself out of this circular trap. But if we use the tags that it has helpfully provided, we might be able to find out a lot more about where the money is going."

"By grinding all those rectangular datasets into triples, they’ve actually managed to make it *less* useful than in its original form. In the original form at least I had a little context of what this data was for and from, which is lost here. A surprising achievement, but I bet you won’t read about it at semantic web conferences any time soon.

Now, will this gigantic hairball of triples enter the LOD map of Middle Earth and double it in size overnight with a big “data.gov” stamp of self-validation?"

"…A colleague once suggested that if our aim is to create more entrepreneurs or at least better prepare potential entrepreneurs, we should replace all entrepreneurship education programs with basic sales courses. After all, and to Fox's point, entrepreneurs are engaged at every step of the way in selling something: an idea, themselves, a product, a vision."

"In fact, democracy is in deep trouble in America. The financial crisis has inflicted hardship on a population that does not like to face harsh reality. President Barack Obama has deployed the “confidence multiplier” and claims to have contained the recession. But if there is a “double dip” recession, Americans will become susceptible to all kinds of fear mongering and populist demagogy…."

"Norgate Investor Services provides quality end-of-day data for stock markets in Australia (ASX), Asia (SGX) and USA (NASDAQ, NYSE, NYSE Amex, NYSE Arca, OTC-BB, PinkSheets). Extensive historical data is available. Hourly snapshot data is available for the ASX and SGX. Data is provided in a "MetaStock™ compatible" data format.

Stock data is organised into security types (equities, indices, warrants, options) and can be organised into custom folders which allow you to segregate such as index participation, sector, industry group, dividend-paying-shares. World Indices are provided free with any subscription."

"I got my data from Norgate Investor Services, (the same folks that provide my end-of-day feed). They only charge a one-time fee for the delisted data, while some of their competitors charge as much as 3x Norgate’s one time fee with the charge recurring annually!
Since adding the delisted database, I have not noted any great differences in the historical results of the systems I work with. I have stated a few times that it is my belief that short-term systems that hold stocks for a few days to a week are not likely to suffer greatly from survivorship bias. So far, this belief is proving to be true."

"It seems most people on that flight were aware of the $20 charge; overhead compartments were filled up completely, mostly with “carry-on” bags significantly larger than the one piece of luggage we had checked. As a result, a number of people had to check bags at the gate. Now here is the interesting thing… because so many people had to check bags at the gate, and those bags had to be available upon deplaning, none of us were allowed to exit the aircraft until after the bags that had been gate checked were brought up. Because so many people were trying to avoid a) waiting at the baggage carousel and b) paying twenty bucks for a piece of luggage, everyone had to wait longer. Perverse incentives lead to undesirable outcomes."

"And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.
The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America."

"One of society’s recently adopted cliches is the “24-hour news cycle” — the recognition that the once-a-day, manufacturing-based version of journalism has essentially passed into history for those who consume and create news via digital systems. Now, it’s said, we get news every hour of every day, and media creators work tirelessly to fill those hours with new stuff. (UPDATE: Yes, I am aware that some print publications can, though few do, provide actual perspective. See update at end.)

That time period needs further adjustment, in two ways. The first is that an hourly news cycle is itself too long. The latest can come at any minute in an era of TV police chases, Twitter and twitchy audiences. Call it the 1,440 minute news cycle."

"It is true. You are. Go try it now. That is an order. I can wait for you to come back and finish reading this post. I could end the post now, but I suppose I’ll go on and tell you a bit about my experience with Heroku yesterday."

"I've built and released a DataMapper adapter for FluidDB. This was a fun project because it was actually my first time using memcache and it is also my first rubygem. You can read the details on github or checkout the Quickstart:…"

"What I worry about, however, is that pockets of the open source community continue to largely be defined and driven by complexity, exclusivity, technocracy, and machismo. While I do support independence and freedom of choice in technology — and therefore open source — I prefer to do so inclusively, with an understanding that there are many more people who are not yet well served by technology because appropriate technology has not been made more usable for them. The beautiful, usable technology in the marketplace need not be the exclusive domain of the proprietary — but so far I’ve see little indication that open source developers take seriously the need for simpler, easier, and more intuitive future-forward interfaces. Perhaps I’m wrong or just uninformed, but so long as products like the OpenOfficeMouse continue to characterize the norm in open source design, I’m not likely going to be able to soon recommend open source solutions to anyone but the most advanced and privileged users.

"We know there are other film production software choices out there. We know because we've tried them all – the old ones and the new ones. Some companies have actually tried to "copy" Gorilla, offering an even cheaper, yet much inferior solution.

The best advice we can give you is try them all and make a decision for yourself depending on the scope of your project and what each individual piece of software can bring to your project. But, if you insist on seeing one, we’ve taken a stab at a basic feature & price comparison chart for your reference."

"…Google's snippet view CONTINUES TO BE ONE OF THE MOST MIND-BOGGLINGLY, INFURIATINGLY, AND SUBLIMELY USELESS SEARCH FUNCTIONS IN THE KNOWN GALAXY, AND QUITE POSSIBLY THE UNKNOWN GALAXY AS WELL (INCLUDING REGIONS REACHABLE ONLY BY STABLE WORMHOLES)"

"But what if we could do this with a glass tower in midtown Manhattan? Or if there was an elevator moving upward through an all-glass shaft, and as the lights in the lobby around it switch on and off, different—and often wildly unexpected—shadows are cast?"

[R tools for financial time-series analysis, among other things]

"Mesh is a library for creating Voronoi, Delaunay and Convex Hull diagrams in Processing. After searching online for a Java package for creating Voronoi diagrams and failing to find anything simple enough to fit my needs I decided to make my own as simple as possible. I did find the wonderfully useful QuickHull3D package, which the algorithms for creating these diagrams are based on. These complete in O(n log n) time."

"Scholars have long asserted that social structure is an important feature of a variety of societal institutions. As part of a larger effort to develop a fully integrated model of judicial decision making, we argue that social structure-operationalized as the professional and social connections between judicial actors-partially directs outcomes in the hierarchical federal judiciary. Since different social structures impose dissimilar consequences upon outputs, the precursor to evaluating the doctrinal consequences that a given social structure imposes is a descriptive effort to characterize its properties. Given the difficulty associated with obtaining appropriate data for federal judges, it is necessary to rely upon a proxy measure to paint a picture of the social landscape. In the aggregate, we believe the flow of law clerks reflects a reasonable proxy for social and professional linkages between jurists…."

"The fourth issue of volume 10 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available online. This is the first part of the two-part Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms, and it contains the following articles:…" [which I unfortunately cannot read; dammit, Springer]

"Rather than actually doing math, let's think like economists. Picking the set R gives us a certain benefit, in the form of the power Q(R), and a cost, tP(R). (The ts term is the same for all R.) Economists, of course, tell us to equate marginal costs and benefits. What is the marginal benefit of expanding R to include a small neighborhood around the point x? Just, by the definition of "probability density", q(x). The marginal cost is likewise tp(x). We should include x in R if q(x) > tp(x), or q(x)/p(x) > t. The boundary of R is where marginal benefit equals marginal cost, and that is why we need the likelihood ratio and not the likelihood difference, or anything else. (Except for a monotone transformation of the ratio, e.g. the log ratio.) The likelihood ratio threshold t is, in fact, the shadow price of statistical power."

"Recently here at Webbynode we had a demand for validating HTML without going as far as driving a browser. We have an internal library that generates HTML after compiling HAML templates. To fulfill our BDD needs, we wanted a simple, straightforward way to validate HTML tags without the need of a full blown browser driving engine, since we don’t have an HTTP server running while testing this library."

"President Obama promised us “Change We Can Believe In,” and the Democrats control Congress. Ironically, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is a former chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission whose unwillingness to be compromised by a gangster was featured in the Martin Scorsese film Casino. Mr. Reid has since been accused of some personal ethical lapses, but he could easily redeem himself if he used his gaming regulation expertise and spearheaded a movement to take on Wall Street’s powerful lobby and create a no-nonsense regulatory agency akin to the Nevada Gaming Commission."

"To use the satellite, pirates typically take an ordinary ham radio transmitter, which operates in the 144- to 148-MHZ range, and add a frequency doubler cobbled from coils and a varactor diode. That lets the radio stretch into the lower end of FLTSATCOM's 292- to 317-MHz uplink range. All the gear can be bought near any truck stop for less than $500. Ads on specialized websites offer to perform the conversion for less than $100. Taught the ropes, even rough electricians can make Bolinha-ware.
"I saw it more than once in truck repair shops," says amateur radio operator Adinei Brochi (PY2ADN) "Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil.""

"An Informative Build is a build that tells us what the state of our development is so that we can make an informed decision. We need an informative build, because otherwise Continuous Integration is just a waste of our time.

That’s right, I said Continuous Integration is a waste of time. It is a waste of time, because simply running a build doesn’t help us unless that build can also tell us what we need to do. An Informative Build:

Fails when something is wrong, letting us know that our system is broken and we must fix it.
When it fails it tells us precisely why it failed so that we know what we have to do to fix it.
When nothing is wrong it doesn’t fail. We shouldn’t be wasting cycles chasing down errors due to brittle tests or external dependencies."

"Let's face it, plain app apps don't cut it any more. These days, users have to be thrilled and entertained. Limelight promotes this attitude to the core. In Limelight you don't build applications, you build theatrical Productions. Limelight provides a Theater in which you open Scenes, build Props, and cast Players to bring your Production to life and razzle-dazzle your audience."

interesting; need to scare up the PDFs

"The top performers of 2009 thus far can basically be summed up with the acronym BRIC. This stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China — the 4 countries that many perceive to be the "future economic superpowers". Such popular single-country ETFs as Russia (RSX), Brazil (EWZ), and India (WPI) (PIN) are near the top of the list. Several Asia region ETFs are spotted, many ex-Japan. Another region that is represented is Latin America, through the (ILF) ETF. A couple of other smaller country names appearing on the list are Thailand (THD), Austria (EWO), and Israel (EIS)."

"If anyone is interested in chatting about what makes a fund a more "successful business" drop me a line. Getting more AUM (assets under management) is the goal of most funds. The maintenance fees of 2% are ridiculously high.

The magic threshold in the business is $100m AUM with +36 months of exposure because these are the operational levels, where most institutions start looking around at allocations. Please note instituional sales cycles for allocations are 9-12 months, while family offices are estimated at 12-18 months."

"3. Accountants like double-entry bookkeeping and balance sheets and stuff so they can keep track of things. They like to record assets on one side, and liabilities on the other side, to make sure that everything adds up, to check that everything's been properly recorded. So they like to list currency as a liability of central banks (even though it isn't, because there's no promise to redeem it, or pay interest on it), and assets on the other side. An accountant would freak out if he recorded currency as a liability and couldn't find an equivalent value of assets. He would say that the central bank is a Ponzi scheme. Which of course it is. And it's just not worth the hassle of trying to explain to accountants that some Ponzi schemes are sustainable, really."

This could use expansion from pragmatism all the way to ironism

"Open source, if we view it through a different lens, is really more about a distributed methodology for software development. The burden of creation is widely distributed across a massive community with more-or-less equal access to tools and systems. In this context, the role of the legal tool is more akin to an enzyme. It was an essential piece of a puzzle, but it was not the only piece. In fact, without the rest of the infrastructure (connectivity, tools, and people) the legal tool on its own would not have led us to GNU/Linux."

"But perhaps there are internal numbers that work out that justify this differential of fees. If so, why aren’t the funds shouting them from the rooftops? In an age when individuals have had a lot of their financial risks shifted to them from institutions, where every single individual is expected to be a financial entrepreneur of his or her own future, the idea that individuals are getting hit with much larger fees than larger agents should worry all of us for our financial futures. Making sure that informed traders at the largest institutions are negotiating the price to its optimal setting for all of us, instead of for their insider status, is the definition of how the price mechanism is supposed to work, and can work if fiduciaries are allowed to take these differentials into account."

"What we do know is that the credible competition from AMD certainly seems to have lit a fire of innovation under Intel’s ass in the early to mid-2000s, and Intel later countered AMD with superior Intel products from roughly 2006 to today. That part of the competition played out as it should in organic fashion, but the part where AMD grabbed market share during its own period of superiority obviously never happened … and it’s pretty clear to many people why it didn’t."

"On October 8th, 2009, the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, hosted an international cast of social scientists, information systems engineers, venture capitalists, innovation consultants and designers for the first-ever Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) Conference. The substance of the conference centered around measuring and visualizing the emergent patterns of communication within social networks, identifying and tracking trends as they ripple throughout a social system, then pulling out the social and anthropological meaning of what we observe, allowing us to better understand and perhaps even forecast human behavior. This creates a unique opportunity to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of collaboration, and to find the trendsetters, thought leaders, and gate keepers within any given network. "Bleeding edge" doesn't quite do this stuff justice; this is the blade that precedes the bleeding edge."

"I suspect Frank is right on the pay issue, but for the wrong reasons. I am always staggered when I hear of law school and business school graduates being in debt to the tune of $100,000, even $200,000. I have no idea what the level for MDs is, but I imagine it is even worse.

And you cannot discharge student debt in a bankruptcy. You have no choice but to pay it (or I suppose flee the US or go underground, there are always extreme options). So the fee for service model may remain intact despite the fact that it produces poor outcomes for society as a whole because the current generation of doctors needs high incomes to so they can service their debts."

"On Monday, November 9, 2009, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in In re Bilski, and two CLE providers plan to offer same day or next day coverage of the proceedings."

"Why did these killing sprees begin cropping up in the mid-1980s? When I studied these murders for my book, Going Postal, I traced the roots to Reagan-era economic policies that changed the postwar relationship between employees and companies, and between the middle class and the super-rich. Government regulation of business was reduced, unions were decimated, and a radical new brand of capitalism became a kind of state religion. The trouble began in the U.S. Postal Service, a major government entity suddenly subjected to market forces under President Richard Nixon. He signed a law banning strikes, opening up the USPS to private-sector competition, and mandating that it become profitable by 1983. Not coincidentally, 1983 was the year of the first postal employee-on-employee shooting in South Carolina. A once-comfy government job had transformed into the sort of stressful workplace that the rest of America would soon experience, too."

"High-speed rail doesn’t simply proceed from point A to point B; it has the potential to energize the cities and towns where it stops in between. The normal practice is to locate intermediate stations in populated areas roughly 50 miles apart. In Europe, high-speed railroads have generated the most growth in provincial cities, as once remote districts benefit from their newfound closeness to hubs such as Paris and Berlin. In a century that will demand more compact, energy-efficient development, high-speed rail has the potential to establish a new superstructure for growth."

"Experts on extremist groups say that the outcries of right-wing tea-partiers, death panellers, birthers, and the like are accompanied by increased activity all along the paranoid fringe—from radical border-patrol groups to skinheads to sovereign citizens. Two camps are particularly restive: militia enthusiasts and white supremacists; their members are seething because of the persistence of two wars and the election of a black (and Democratic) president with an ambitious agenda. The previous upsurge of antigovernment activity in the 1990s—of which McVeigh’s attack marked the apex—was set off in part by a recession and the election of a liberal president."

"REvolution Computing offers open source products and services for high performance analytics, including REvolution R Enterprise which delivers 100% R and more—optimized, validated and supported."

"It boils down to this: GitHub is a warzone. We are constantly overloaded and rely very, very heavily on our queue. If it's backed up, we need to know why. We need to know if we can fix it. We need workers to not get stuck and we need to know when they are stuck.

We need to see what the queue is doing. We need to see what jobs have failed. We need stats: how long are workers living, how many jobs are they processing, how many jobs have been processed total, how many errors have there been, are errors being repeated, did a deploy introduce a new one?

We need a background job system as serious as our web framework. I highly recommend DelayedJob to anyone whose site is not 50% background work.

But GitHub is 50% background work."

"Engagement that begins with the intention of affecting others but not being affected by them, such as beginning with “I know” is ultimately merely an attempt to introduce or perpetuate a hierarchical power structure. By contrast, engagement that begins with the willingness to be affected by others is in accord with the horizontal and ethical environment of mutual respect that is characteristic of p2p culture."

"Justice Holmes once famously dissented that it’s a form of judicial activism to base our courts on “an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain.” It seems like the same should be said for our government and our regulatory bodies, especially as they try and figure out how to fix the mess that is the financial markets. And it’s worth noting that the founder of this economic theory, The Efficient Markets Hypothesis, doesn’t even believe that people actually in the financial markets entertain it."

"This is a degree of uncertainty that can't be fixed by changes in evaluation standards.

As for innovation, lists and lists of research suggests that patents reduce software innovation.

There was a time when if you wrote something, you owned it, you could sell it, you could give it away. It could be put in the accounts and it could be used as the base for collaboration. Now, ownership of a piece of software is hopeful speculation. There is no reliable way to have a settled expectation regarding the boundaries or the extent to which you own a piece of software. This uncertainty, and this unfair regulation is what the Supreme Court has the chance to rid us of by giving the USPTO a reliable tool for excluding software ideas from patentable subject matter."

"In gift wrap emergencies when you've got the present but need some wrapping, here's an idea for turning a magazine page into a bow. (There may be better ways to stick this thing together, but I used what I had on hand: staples and adhesive glue dots)"

"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."