Winner Takes All, Long Tails And The Fractilization Of Culture

"What's much more interesting to me is what happens beyond the hits. And, as you start to dig down into subsectors or subcultures, you begin to notice an interesting pattern there as well: that those subsectors and subcultures follow that same power law pattern themselves. The big name bands in a subculture may seem "small" in the wider world, but they're huge within the subculture. Within that subculture, they're the winner who took all — but from a more limited population.

In some ways, it's the fractalization of culture.

Just as a fractal repeats its same pattern as you zoom in and look closer on the smaller segments, so do cultural subsegments. And those segments continue to thrive, despite the recommendation systems just pushing people to the hits."

Tagged with: subculture • music • long-tail • economics • recommendation • business • culture •

Is this the end for human space flight?

"It may simply be that space exploration is incompatible with US democracy. A Mars shot would take four presidential terms at least. No president will ask taxpayers to fund something he won't be around to take credit for." Touché, Mr Hanlon. Though assuming NASA is the only game in town is your major logical error here.

Tagged with: human • space • exploration • history • politics • economics • nation-states •

History of Economic Thought

Does what it say on the tin (complete with 1998-style webdesign!)

Tagged with: philosophy • history • economics • theory • resource •

Bigger not necessarily better, when it comes to brains

""In bigger brains we often don't find more complexity, just an endless repetition of the same neural circuits over and over. This might add detail to remembered images or sounds, but not add any degree of complexity. To use a computer analogy, bigger brains might in many cases be bigger hard drives, not necessarily better processors."

This must mean that much 'advanced' thinking can actually be done with very limited neuron numbers. Computer modelling shows that even consciousness can be generated with very small neural circuits, which could in theory easily fit into an insect brain."

Tagged with: brain • intelligence • neuroscience • animals • insects • consciousness •

The ‘In Rainbows’ Experiment: Did It Work?

"On what's essentially the two-year anniversary of In Rainbows' release, I'm struck by how safe it all seems now. Releasing a pay-what-you-wish album now is almost yawn-worthy. Major artists are experimenting with price points, novel distribution models and giveaways at a dizzying pace. But we aren't any closer to knowing what works or what will become a consistent model for the future.

Today, with the increasing popularity of free (legal) music streaming, the music industry's core issues are more complex and much more urgent. Will fractions of pennies per play ever replace booming 1990s CD revenue? Will people even use digital tip jars if they can just press play to hear anything, any time, anywhere? In 2007, letting fans choose was "the most audacious experiment in years." Two years later, it's almost quaint."

Tagged with: music • business • In-Rainbows • Radiohead • marketing • freemium • model •

Dating sites use DNA to find your perfect match

"The online services are based on the theory that people are attracted to partners who have different immune systems than their own. It is believed that this is a function of evolution with babies bred from parents with different immune systems having a wider variety of immune system genes, and therefore, more robust immune systems. For this reason the sites limit their DNA analysis to the genes of the immune system to make its matches.

These genes, known as HLA (human leukocyte antigen) genes (also sometimes referred to as MHC for major histocompatibility complex) control how the immune system recognizes and fights off viruses, fungi and bacteria and is also the portion of the genome doctors look at when looking for compatible organ donors. Studies have indicated that people with different MHC genes will actually smell better to you than people whose MHC genes are similar to your own."

Tagged with: DNA • genetics • compatibility • human • dating •

The Accessibility Paradox

"In order to draw customer into their stores, Target and Wal-Mart are making ten bestselling author's books available for under ten bucks. [...] The American Booksellers Association has even asked the Department of Justice to intervene. [...] But I'm also taken aback by the horrified response of the book industry. I thought the big crisis was that nobody reads. Now it turns out the problem is that books are so popular with the masses they're being used as bait to draw in shoppers.

Come on, guys, get your story straight! Which is it?"

Tagged with: books • publishing • retail • discounts • libraries • information • knowledge • value • free • open-source •

Scan Tailor

"Scan Tailor is an interactive post-processing tool for scanned pages. It performs operations such as page splitting, deskewing, adding/removing borders, and others. You give it raw scans, and you get pages ready to be printed or assembled into a PDF or DJVU file."

Tagged with: pdf • scanning • image • utility • software • clean • borders • Linux •

The Looming Collapse of FedEx – Dematerialization 2

"Once the Authenticated Document portion of FedEx’s business fades away, they’ll have to retreat into the molecule moving business. Here’s a need that, at least for the immediate future, doesn’t get demolished by the Internet.

At some point, rapid prototyping and 3d printing becomes a mature technology. It leaves the design studios and then the factories and ends up, if not people’s houses, then at least as commonly distributed as print shops or 24 photo developers (which are themselves getting to be less and less common). Just-in-time fabbing.

So many of the things that we ship are mass-produced and interchangeable. Take a look around you and consider all the stuff you might move, were you planning to move. How much of it is stuff where an exact copy would be fine? How much of it is stuff where a factory-new copy would better than fine? How much crap do you ship because it’s easier/cheaper to just ship it than to get a new or better one?" This guy's good.

Tagged with: futurism • fabbing • delivery • infrastructure • information • networks • dematerialisation •

IBM Moves Closer To Creating Computer Based on Insights From The Brain

"To perform the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceed the scale of the cat cortex, the team built a cortical simulator that incorporates a number of innovations in computation, memory, and communication as well as sophisticated biological details from neurophysiology and neuroanatomy. This scientific tool, akin to a linear accelerator or an electron microscope, is a critical instrument used to test hypotheses of brain structure, dynamics and function. The simulation was performed using the cortical simulator on Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes of main memory." Your Transhumanist/AI/Singularity story of the month, if not the year.

Tagged with: brain • neuroscience • computing • IBM • simulation • uploading • transhumains • singularity • AI •

WordPress hack : Automatically output the content in two columns

Like it says in the title there. Could probably be kludged into other CMS outputs, too.

Tagged with: wordpress • hack • columns • content • code • function • webdev •

Everett True: Dispatches From ‘A Fading Music Critic’

"Does what I write have any impact upon an industry that has long since shed the need for dependency upon indeterminate outside factors such as quality? What need is there for tastemaker critics — they'd be called "experts" in other trades — when you can aggregate opinions from a thousand enthusiastic voices (bloggers)? What need is there for a music critic when you can log on to Amazon and read a thousand user-generated reviews?

Right now, from where I'm sitting: none whatsoever. Other critics might argue otherwise. But then, they're being paid to."

Tagged with: Everett-True • music • criticism • blogging • new-media •

500 Internal Server Error

500 Internal Server Error

Tagged with: none

Query Multiple Taxonomies

"Say you have two custom taxnomies defined: genre and artist.

Currently, you can do the following types of queries on your site:

?genre=jazz

?genre=jazz&cat=1

But you can’t do this:

?genre=jazz&artist=Chet+Baker

WordPress will just ignore one of the parameters.

This plugin fixes that." Hmmmm.

Tagged with: wordpress • taxonomy • plugin • webdev •

Cormac McCarthy on The Road

"I don't think there's any rich period or fallow period. That's just a perception you get from what's published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs. Someone asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, and she said, "Because I was good at it." And I think that's the right answer. If you're good at something it's very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who've had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, "The most significant thing in my life is that I've been extraordinarily lucky." And when you hear that you know you're hearing the truth. It doesn't diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail."

Tagged with: Cormac-McCarthy • writing • literature • books • cinema • interview •

Judge Dredd ‘Black Box’ recorder/spy kit for guns unveiled

"The idea is that the Black Box electronics would be installed internally in a void space such as the pistol grip of an assault rifle. (It "fits in any weapon type", apparently.) The gadget would run on a non-replaceable battery lasting ten years or 100,000 shots – covering the weapon handily between major overhauls.

The initial uses of the Black Box would, according to FN, be in logistics and maintenance. The in-gun shot counter would keep track of how many rounds were being fired, updating a future soldier's digital comm/puter system – Land Warrior or some similar rig – as it went, using some form of wearable networking.

Not only would the soldier then know automatically how many shots he had fired without the need to keep count or look at his magazines and pouches, but so would his team leader – and higher commanders would be warned in advance if their people seemed likely to run out of ammo." ECAWBH.

Tagged with: ECAWBH • weapon • monitoring • black-box • technology •

The Coming Nuclear Crisis

"… the most worrying problem is the misconception that uranium is plentiful. The world's nuclear plants today eat through some 65,000 tons of uranium each year. Of this, the mining industry supplies about 40,000 tons. The rest comes from secondary sources such as civilian and military stockpiles, reprocessed fuel and re-enriched uranium. "But without access to the military stocks, the civilian western uranium stocks will be exhausted by 2013, concludes Dittmar.

It's not clear how the shortfall can be made up since nobody seems to know where the mining industry can look for more.

That means countries that rely on uranium imports such as Japan and many western countries will face uranium .shortages, possibly as soon as 2013. Far from being the secure source of energy that many governments are basing their future energy needs on, nuclear power looks decidedly rickety." Frying pan, fire.

Tagged with: nuclear • power • energy • sustainability • uranium • shortage • fuel •

Jackpot: Lawyers earn fees from law they wrote

"All the cases have been initiated by Rubin's committee or Avila, who also is a member of the lawyers' group, according to an Associated Press review of legal documents, correspondence and legislative records, and interviews with lawyers, school and government officials, current and former legislators and voting-rights experts.

There is nothing illegal about the lawyers profiting from a law they authored and state lawmakers approved. But it is unusual that after seven years all legal efforts are so narrowly focused, especially since Avila told lawmakers when he testified for the bill in 2002 that he expected other attorneys would take on cases because of favorable incentives written into the measure." Weasels.

Tagged with: law • legal • US • legislature •

Pop As Modernism

"‘Pop’ has mutated into pop – as ubiquitous, abundant and invisible as electricity. It’s barely an exaggeration to say that pop is the day – and as Philip Larkin once rhetorically questioned, where can we live but days? To get to a place entirely beyond the precinct of pop and its merchandise, one would have to travel for weeks and perhaps into the remote past or far future. It would be like trying to find your way out of the world’s largest mall, or rather the world-as-mall, for pop has played its part in converting the globe into a brightly-lit park of productised pleasure. Pop is as inescapable as the day, and it establishes its rhythm. From the garrulous morning DJ on the radio, to the muzak of shops and offices, to the atmosphere in clubs, bars, and restaurants, pop music gives the day its shape, and a day completely devoid of it is rare to the point of aberration. So ‘popular’ that it’s universal, pop, like weather, is simply there."

Tagged with: pop • music • culture • modernism • criticism •

Make a Footer Stick to the Bottom of the Page

"There are several ways to make a footer stick to the bottom of a page using CSS. But until now, they've used long and messy hacks or a lot of extra HTML markup; this method uses only 15 lines of CSS and hardly any HTML markup. Even better, it's completely valid CSS, and it works in all major browsers. Internet Explorer 5 and up, Firefox, Safari, Opera and more."

Tagged with: webdev • css • layout • sticky • footer • technique •

Everything you need to know about WordPress 2.9’s post image feature

Hmmm, interesting.

Tagged with: webdev • wordpress • post • images • functionality •

‘Female Viagra’ boosts sexual desire in women with flagging libido

"Doctors involved in the study said the drug may prove to be an effective treatment for low libido, a problem they estimate affects between 9% and 26% of women, depending on their age and whether they have been through the menopause.

The drug has proved controversial among sex researchers. Some argue pharmaceutical companies are exaggerating the number of women affected by low libido to expand their market, and are pushing a pill that will not deal with psychological issues that might put someone off sex, such as poor body image or stress." Call me cynical, but I'm not seeing this as a win for the feminist project.

Tagged with: sex • fulfilment • drug • women • pharmacology • marketing •

9 Most Common IE Bugs and How to Fix Them

Does what it says on the tin.

Tagged with: webdev • IE • IE6 • css • rendering • bugs • fixes •