"We consider the computation of the volume of the union of high-dimensional geometric objects. While showing that this problem is #P-hard already for very simple bodies (i.e., axis-parallel boxes), we give a fast FPRAS for all objects where one can: (1) test whether a given point lies inside the object, (2) sample a point uniformly, (3) calculate the volume of the object in polynomial time. All three oracles can be weak, that is, just approximate. This implies that Klee's measure problem and the hypervolume indicator can be approximated efficiently even though they are #P-hard and hence cannot be solved exactly in time polynomial in the number of dimensions unless P=NP. Our algorithm also allows to approximate efficiently the volume of the union of convex bodies given by weak membership oracles. "

"Those that are mastering allocative and creative advantage, in contrast, are learning to create thick value: authentic economic value, that's meaningful to humans. That's why allocative and creative advantage are the equivalent of economic superweapons. They are letting today's revolutionaries stun, stagger, and vaporize rivals, no matter how big, bad, or historic.

And that's never mattered more. An economy built on extractive and protective advantage is a giant, endless Ponziconomy. Value is transferred from one party to the next — but little is created anew. That's what we're finding out the hard way. Only through creative and allocative advantage can we rebuild a more meaningful economy."

"Underscore is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects. It's the tie to go along with jQuery's tux."

"The biggest reason this is possible is because nobody realizes it. If it was conventional wisdom that a bunch of unelected bankers looking out for rich people were the reason everyone was out of work, politicians would be forced to explain to angry voters why we had this crazy system and might actually consider doing something about it. But, incredibly, it just seems like nobody has any idea. Voters don’t realize it, politicians don’t understand it, journalists don’t cover it. And, in fact, they’re so far from having any idea that it’s really difficult to explain it to them. When you say a bunch of unelected bankers are the reason there are no jobs, they just look at you like you’re crazy. I’ve just spent a page or two explaining it and you still probably think I’m crazy. But it’s true! This isn’t some Ron Paul-type crackpot idea; this is mainstream economics, from Paul Krugman to the head of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors."

"Here's some more on the subject of "Repo 105." Marketplace Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch tries to explain what Lehman Brothers was up to."

"lazy.rb provides lazy evaluation and futures in Ruby.

For lazy evaluation, the facilities are similar to those provided by R5 Scheme. There are two functions: Kernel.promise (similar to Scheme’s delay) which takes a block for later evaluation, and Kernel.demand (similar to Scheme’s force), which forces its evaluation (if necessary) and returns its cached result."

"Over the next several years, we follow the career of Anakinn as he falls in love with Irish princess Paðéma after killing her father at the Battle of Confey, and his mentor Víga-Óbívan continues to encourage him to betray Falfaðinn, the King of Kóruskantborg.… However, Anakinn is loyal to his oaths to King Falfaðinn and remains with him in Kóruskantborg, where he rises to great honor in the service of the king and is the recipient of many good gifts. He also begins the planning of the construction of the great ship Dauðastjarna, which when completed will be the crown jewel of Falfaðinn’s fleet, and will hold a crew large enough to sack a city single-handedly. Because of his great skill in hunting, Anakinn is now known to most as Veiðari-Anakinn, “hunter-Anakinn,” or often simply Veiðari."

"Hook into the rendering pipeline to create special effect. Use low level rendering commands to achieve exactly what you want."

"Google SketchUp is software that you can use to create 3D models of anything you like. With its embedded Ruby application programming interface (API), you can extend and customize the program to suit your needs. If you love SketchUp but ever thought "I just wish it did XYZ," then there's a good chance the Ruby API can make it happen. "

"He is a man who loves the world so hard that it makes him hate. He’s the kind of guy who might put out a cigarette in someone’s eye, but he’ll also try like hell to save the lives (and eyes) of a hundred other people when they’re being victimized."

"I am fairly obsessive about deleting prototype code. The code that I produced might be fine, it might not. It is more than likely that it is not great because I was learning something new and making mistakes along the way. I do not want to be in a position to be building on crap code. I alway build on the simplest thing that can possibly work. The only way to be sure of that (that I know of) is BDD."

"About ten years ago I attended an event hosted by a couple of medical academics. It was a concert at a pretty big auditorium in Denver, and the invitees were almost all participants in the academics’ prostate cancer research trials (I was there for other reasons). This was before I had begun to study the pharmaceutical industry’s role in the obesity panic, and I remember thinking at the time, who is paying for all this? (The event was on a scale that must have cost well into six figures). That’s not a question I would ask today."

"cocoaNEC 2.0 is a Mac OS X application intended primarily for the design and modeling of antennas.

cocoaNEC 2.0 is a Universal Binary Cocoa based application. It runs natively on both Intel based and PowerPC based Macintosh computers that use Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or newer.

The application is free and it can be downloaded from the Download tab button at the top of this page.

Online tutorials, reference manuals and example files for the application are available through the User's Manual tab button. The What's New page lists features that have changed since the previously released version of cocoaNEC 2.0. "

"So I like to write a lot of music. I have not really released anything for a few years as I have been very busy freelancing in London on various web projects; and my music website was last updated before I started learning JavaScript.

I want to get back into writing music over the next year or two and started to think about how to make my site a little different. One of my ideas was to use a dial styled like an electronic keyboard to control my page through AJAX, so I set about creating the dial you see to your left.

As you can probably see, the dial has lights as point-markers which flash to the Beast Per Minute so when people click on my tunes, I can update the BPM on the UI Dial to add some depth to the user experience."

awesome

"Please join us on March 24 for Ada Lovelace Day
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited. Just sign the pledge below (click ‘pledge’ after you have completed the reCaptcha) and publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010."

"PictureIt is a web-based animation program that gives users the sensation of turning the pages of digitized rare materials that would be otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to view or obtain. Volume 1 of John James Audubon’s Birds of America was selected as the inaugural PictureIt book for a few reasons. Foremost, the eight volume set has special meaning as the first purchase for the Library by the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan. As well, the University of Pittsburgh had already digitized all volumes of the Birds of America set and was willing to share the images with the Library. And finally, the illustrated plates of this set were intricately completed, making them as much art work as scientific work. Volume 1 of Audubon’s Birds of America was also selected for the first PictureIt book because its complex images demonstrate the product’s embedded magnification tool which allows users to get up-close and view the details of each illustration."

"MapTiler is graphical application for online map publishing. Your map can create overlay of standard maps like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft VirtualEarth or OpenStreetMap and can be also visualized in 3D form by Google Earth. Only thing you have to do for publishing the map is to upload the automatically generated directory with tiles into your webserver."

"Spritely is a simple plugin with only two key methods, sprite() and pan() both of which simply animate the background-image css property of an element. The difference between the two is that a 'sprite' image contains two or more 'frames' of animation, whereas a 'pan' image contains a continuous image which pans left or right and then repeats. Typically, in either case, you would use a png file (with or without transparency) for this. You might wish to use a transparent gif for Internet Explorer 6, though it probably won't look as good. Your html elements must already be the correct size you want the sprite to appear, but the background image will typically be larger than the html element, and the spritely methods reposition the background image within the html element."

"Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library.
Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.
Raphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.
For more examples take a look at charting plugin: gRaphaël"

"Bailing out the financial system, but not bailing out schools in financial trouble because of the crisis, is unconscionable…"

"One of the most important concepts to understand in the coming years will be the power of digital ecosystems. On the surface it looks pretty obvious what they are and what they can be used for. But as I will show you in this essay, so much potential is still untapped."

"Every project I’ve worked on in the last two years has heavily involved the use of web APIs. Libersy at the time (no idea about now) had an architecture that was extensively API based, even for communication between internal applications (an architecture I strongly argued against, bee tea dubs). Since then I’ve futzed with web APIs almost exclusively. From very narrow focused uses like University of Michigan’s Bluestream Service, to more broad but still fairly local APIs like the Ann Arbor District Library’s soon-to-be-updated API, all the way to APIs of major web applications like Twitter and Flickr.

Constant exposure has turned me into a bit of a snob: I can’t stand working with a poorly designed API! If you’re about to design or release an API for the web and want to avoid the ire of your developers, I’ve summed up the best (and worst) of what I’ve seen into 8 rules:"

"The real problem with the DIKW pyramid is that it's a pyramid. The image that knowledge (much less wisdom) results from applying finer-grained filters at each level, paints the wrong picture. That view is natural to the Information Age which has been all about filtering noise, reducing the flow to what is clean, clear and manageable. Knowledge is more creative, messier, harder won, and far more discontinuous. "

"It is at the three or four times in a 24 hour period that forex traders are well advised to switch tack and reverse near-term directional thinking. The European and NYMEX close are the U.S. based things to get under our belts, because then, maybe, the equity markets can reveal where they really want to go. Traders looking for moves outside of 06:00 and 11:00 EDT, and maybe 14:30 EDT may just find themselves sitting and waiting, wondering why they just bought the high of the day that then reversed.
As the global economy travels through the contraction phase of its business cycle the leaning is towards looking at S&P futures trade to confirm sentiment. The speculators are never too far away from the S&P in times of fear; either selling into the fear of loss, or buying into the fear of missing profits. That is the reason for so much near-term volatility, and that is how things will stay until signs of GDP expansion are seen globally."

"I am confident that the Scrum Alliance sees the need for developer improvement, and that they are working toward making their members aware of the need. I am confident that they are working to provide resources that Scrum teams can use to begin to build the skills that they need. And I’m dedicated to influencing them in the right direction, and to bringing as many people into the situation to help accomplish that.

In the end, what I care about is software development, as narrow and geeky as that might be. I care about other people finding the joy in the craft that I’ve found, and that means they have to discover the joy of life-long learning. I think this Scrum Alliance effort can help with that, and I think that “certification” has little or nothing to do with it. What counts will be what we tell the people who show up."

"Rightsizing will not “shunt” development to the exurban fringe. That’s what’s happening already. Most of the neighborhoods we’re discussing haven’t seen significant investment since the 1950s. If nothing is done, they will continue to deteriorate and the exurban fringe will continue to grow. If they can once again be made dense and sustainable, in part through consolidation, Detroit might have a fighting chance to compete against suburban neighborhoods by providing a safe, viable urban alternative."

"Another problem I've often had (as recently as last semester!) is that my goals for students–what they're expected to be able to do when the semester is over–are often not well defined. When we don't have a sense of where we're going, our 15-week courses often fall apart somewhere around week 7 or so. But this should not be such an issue in high school."

"The purpose of this site is to provide a comprehensive list of links related to optics and optical simulation in general. Topics include optical design, optical engineering, illumination, Laser, optical materials, thin film coatings, and many more subjects needed to build and analyze complex optical systems."

"I personally scan the books I bought because I’m tired of thousands of them cluttering up my house, ending up lost at the bottom of a box marked Dishes, getting eaten by bugs, or attacked by acid inherent in the paper. If you don’t like the idea of reading electronic editions of books, stop reading here! Also, if you think format-shifting is intellectual property theft, stop reading here. There are as many reasons people have for scanning books as there are people:…"

"These are basic life skills that everyone should want to master. If we taught them broadly, and if everyone learned them, then this sort of mastery wouldn’t attract the geek label. But we don’t teach these skills broadly, most people don’t learn them, and the language we use isn’t our friend. If systems thinking is geeky then only geeks will be systems thinkers. We can’t afford for that to be true. We need everyone to be a systems thinker."

"How do we choose k, the number of clusters ?
This topic is so annoying, that I'm going to devote more than one post to it. While choosing k has been the excuse for some of the most violent hacks in clustering, there are at least a few principled directions, and there's a lot of room for further development."

"This seems a reversal of some things I have said in the past about the need for change control. I said that "shit happens" is not an excuse any more. I still believe that. Just because some incidents will remain unpreventable doesn't mean that many others can't be prevented. Just because fixing a problem in one place means higher risks will be taken elsewhere doesn't mean we shouldn't fix the problems. And just because complex systems are impossible to stop breaking doesn't mean that there isn't negligence behind some breakages."

"There's plenty to argue about here and he presents in black and white some issues that are full of grays, but chances are you won't spend 20 minutes today with a smarter person. It's worth watching and thinking about …"

"What really makes the current period stand out is the number of people (and percent) that have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. In the early '80s, the 27 weeks or more unemployed peaked at 2.9 million or 2.6% of the civilian labor force.

In January, there were 6.3 million people unemployed for 27 weeks or more, or 4.1% of the labor force. The number declined slightly in February, but this is much higher than earlier periods."

"Wow. If a person markets something, like a book they've written, or a product they are selling, it is regulated as if it were advertising published by a media company, such as a newspaper, TV, magazine, etc.

That means everyone is now a media company. And subject to the same regulations – at least in the UK. Wow."

"Many definitions define what social capital is and what it does. In fact, there seems to be broader agreement in the literature about what social capital does, than what it is! In particular, it is widely agreed that social capital facilitates mutually beneficial collective action."

"Menand focuses on the elite institutions that still concentrate on providing an education in the arts and sciences, and argues that they have failed to respond to these and other painfully obvious problems because they remain stuck in patterns that were set a century and more ago. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he explains, scholars set out to create a limited free space in which they could set standards for the fields they practiced and for undergraduate and graduate training–a professional space dedicated, like the legal and medical professional spaces that took shape at the same time, to pursuing the general good rather than personal gain."

"Studies about productivity declines when working more than 40 hours a week surface with disturbing regularity. As a developer your creativity declines, you make more mistakes, you miss existing issue etc., to the point where you're doing more harm than good. Should I even mention the health concerns when you spend that much time engaged in the same activity (they even had rules about spending too much time at work in the Soviet Union, and those guys were all about putting in the time for the good of the people). What about diet, you can only survive on coke for so long – poor John couldn't even make it to 40."

"Readers are encouraged to fight RBP as they read it, rather than just soaking up the information. Although I claim this book is about “Best Practices”, the only reason that is true is that it’s a result of countless conversations with folks who are deep in the Ruby trenches getting stuff done. The only way for RBP to remain current and relevant is to continue these discussions, using its content as a jumping off point for fresh ideas."

"We investigate if the actions by individuals in creating effective new innovations are aligned with the reuse of those innovations by others in a private-collective software development context. …"

"At FloatingSheep, we're willing to search for and analyze almost anything that falls within the realm of human experience. Sometimes this is mundane (pizza) and sometimes it is contentious (abortion) but most of the time it falls somewhere in between. Such as, where can I get a drink?"

"In 2008 and 2009 exports of debt (the toxic stuff plus the nominally non-toxic stuff (US Treasuries)), only accounted for 3%.

It is common practice to ignore exports of debt when calculating America’s balance of trade. But, conceptually, there is not much difference between selling a foreigner or a foreign government a toxic synthetic CDO (that blows up in his face) and selling him a ship-load of genetically engineered soya-beans (or melamine tainted milk).

The logic for leaving exports of debt out of the calculation is presumably that at some point in the future the CDO that was “sold” will need to be paid back, which will require funds to flow out of USA into the pockets of foreigners, who may then decide to exchange those dollars for something else."

"Which neatly illustrates one major reason why, at the end of the day, I write this blog. Sitting down to keyboard with cigar and libation in hand does wonders to clarify not only my own thoughts on any particular subject, but also whether it rises to the level of something I might find interesting from another pen. If not, back to the woodpile it goes, where I can scavenge it for useful material later or consign it to the fireplace for fuel. The false starts, dead ends, and inchoate beginnings embodied in my unpublished oeuvre represent the very essence of active thought. Too bad I'll never let you see them in all their messy glory. If you did, you just might begin to believe that I don't really know what I'm talking about.<2>

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must get back to chasing those tops. I'll get back to you if I catch one that's interesting."

"Related, it reminded me a lot of Dan Pink’s thesis from Drive, and his TED talk, of the operators of the “new workforce”, are based in the intrinsic motivation associated with autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Seeing as how I spend far more time looking at the trends of business than of play, I realized…for me (and many others), work is a type of play.

From Nicole’s Four Keys of FUN, I’m proposing the Four Keys to Business.…"

"The place where I think Sloman is misguided is in his formulation of scientific models in an either/or way, as if, in truth, social variables are linked in simple causal paths, with a scientific goal of figuring out if A causes B or the reverse. I don't know much about intelligence, beer consumption, and socioeconomic status, but I certainly don't see any simple relationships between income, religious attendance, party identification, and voting–and I don't see how a search for such a pattern will advance our understanding, at least given current techniques. I'd rather start with description and then go toward causality following the approach of economists and statisticians by thinking about potential interventions one at a time. I'd love to see Sloman's and Pearl's ideas of the interplay between observational and experimental data developed in a framework that is less strongly tied to the notion of choice among simple causal structures."

"The first category is best termed Design as an Exploration of Production. This category is the largest in terms of the number of .MGX products it contains, and is made up of products whose central interest is an exploration of what rapid manufacturing technologies can produce, which conventional technologies cannot. It is typified by complex detailing on both the interior and exterior of the product, geometries which would be impossible to achieve were any form of tooling required."

"…each time you log a return visit to an establishment, you're registering a de-facto vote in favor of that good or service (an endorsement). Chances are you're not checking in at a restaurant that served you undercooked chicken last week. So establishments with the highest ratio of return visits by the same person are being collectively curated as well liked."

WORTH TATTOOING: “The adult human being simply knows too many solutions for problems that no longer exist.”

"So here we are. Mice with a genetic make-up that alters the diversity of their gut microbes get hungry, and that hunger makes them eat more. They get obese and suffer lots of other symptoms. Get rid of that particular set of microbes, and the mice lose their hunger and start to recover. And that distinctive diversity of microbes can, on its own, make genetically normal mice hungry–and thus obese, diabetic, and so on."

"To be honest, there’s not much to say about the Javascript example because it is so simple. We avoid the whole metaclass business because Javascript uses prototypal inheritance. This means that Javascript does not distinguish between classes/prototypes and instances and, therefore, we can add our desired behavior directly to the instance. We use the exact same technique for adding a method to the prototype, but this time we simply add the function directly to the instance. Again, this function is a closure. And again, this function has access to the instance’s state using this.…
Closures are so ingrained in the language’s design that metaprogramming seems to happen without even trying. This little exercise has left me very excited about the potential of Javascript not only as a great language for the web, but also as a powerful server-side language. You should be excited too."

"Now right now, consumers are facing a range of financial products, from student loans to credit cards to mutual funds, that are much more complicated than they faced in 1933. Some of this complication is innovation, some is meant to synthetically create opacity in the product innovating product differentiation, and some is just regulatory arbitrage. As Dan Geldon has written, the regime of disclosure has been turned into a weapon against consumers instead of the mechanism to let information and competition do its job. So it’s time to update that regime to handle the 21st century."

"Our conference system forces researchers to focus too heavily on quick, technical, and safe papers instead of considering broader and newer ideas. Meanwhile, we have devoted much of our time and money to conferences where we can present our research that we can rarely attend conferences and workshops to work and socialize with our colleagues.

Computer science has grown to become a mature field where no major university can survive without a strong CS department. It is time for computer science to grow up and publish in a way that represents the major discipline it has become."

"The effect of that “Yes, but…” is to make scholarly history complex and at the same time weaselly, uncertain and always whirling around to catch the interpretation sneaking up from behind.

The complexity that this creates is, of course, at odds both with the simplicity that Paul Krugman craved and that economics provided. It is at odds, as well, with the adversarial nature of the court room, in which opposing counsels must argue, without doubt or allowance for ambiguity, their side of the case. It is why Krugman was right to leave history behind, for that complex ambivalence is at the heart of the historical project. Staying with a subject whose central tenet he found repulsive would have been difficult, at best. It is why historians like Ambrose were wrong to testify for the tobacco companies, because their testimony came in service of an argument in which the essential equivocation was stripped away."

"This leads me to something else that I always find hard to articulate: the ROI of IndyHall, or even coworking in general.

We’ve been running IndyHall for nearly 3 years as a business for a reason, and a profitable one at that. But the metrics for ROI aren’t salient, since most of the investment has been in human, knowledge, and time capital, and the return doesn’t show up on our balance sheet. As such, Geoff and I don’t take a draw, at least not in terms of cash…because that’s not what’s we’ve invested. If there was a balance sheet for the social capital we’ve invested and seen in return, though, and we had metrics for it, we’d be able to far better express and share what we’ve accomplished."

"I've been trying to think of something to say about this, but haven't come up with anything that hasn't already been said, and I have to go teach for most of the rest of the day so I'll turn it over to you. What do you think of this argument from Bruce Bartlett about why Congress worked better from the 1930s to the 1970s than it does today?:…"

"Ask Why
Finally, and this is the most important thing I've learned, always ask why. When you see a blip in a graph, you should wonder why it's there. If you find some correlation, you should think about whether or not it makes any sense. If it does make sense, then cool, but if not, dig deeper. Numbers are great, but you have to remember that when humans are involved, errors are always a possibility."

"I was recently explaining all this to a colleague. To make my point, we Googled that question. Low and behold, there it was: asked and answered — verbatim — on Yahoo! Answers. How many legs does a fish have? Zero. Apparently Yahoo! Answers also knows the number of legs of a crayfish, rabbit, dog, starfish, mosquito, caterpillar, crab, mealworm, and “about 133,000″ more."

"BiotSavart is an application for Mac OS X and Windows XP that calculates the magnetic field resulting from general 3-D configurations of current-carrying conductors. It has proven useful in the design of superconducting and copper coil systems in physics laboratories worldwide. With BiotSavart, you design the conductors while you view them on the screen."

"Merlin Mann calls for websites to offer free, full-text RSS feeds. Jason Snell agrees, but wonders if offering them harms web traffic. As Boing Boing's had a full-content feed since the dawn of time, we can't really tell, but John Gruber switched only recently. He says that in his experience, a dip in traffic did result–but that in the long run, his RSS feed became the primary source of income for Daring Fireball:…"

"It is an experiment born from the common production of shared knowledges, and resistance to exploitation inside and outside the universities. Moreover it is a step toward the goal of building up autonomous institutions. The journal has two sections: "occupations" and "anomalies", which aim respectively to analyze transformations of the university and conflicts in knowledge production. The edu-factory journal has an editorial board, comprising critical scholars, students, and activists from all around the world, and it is open to free contributions. Finally, by experimenting with forms of collective reading and review, it aims to question the traditional peer review processes, and to open new spaces of thinking, learning and struggle within and against the hierarchies of the global knowledge and university market."

"While there seems to be endless conversation about the violence of smashing windows and the damage to the movement done by spontaneous action, there is a notable absence of discussion about the violence of class division in American society and its relationship with higher education.

Is the movement so fragile that a smashed window destroys it–yet broken bodies don’t bring it to boiling point? We are told that the streets must be policed in order to be safe–that no one will join us–that people who would have supported the cause are now frightened to participate. Yet what we see is laughter, dancing and a freedom that is not possible to describe in the language of everyday capitalism. How, we must ask, is a movement that collapses under the weight of overturned trash cans going to withstand the presence of millions of people challenging their relationship to the economy?"

"They have an interesting opening conversation kicked off by Craig confessing (at 1:07) that, in the early days, he thought Stephen had it all together when, in fact, though Fry may have been quite successful, but he was a wreck. And so on and so forth. In the second segment there’s a throwaway reference to Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica in a conversation about Twitter. Jeeze! Sounds like these are educated people.

Principia Mathematica!?#! Late night TV in America. Can it be long before hell freezes over?"

"Principle #6: Working for other people (full-time or in some other capacity) often divorces our experience of work from the fruit of our work. Living off your own projects, created of your own accord, is an entirely different kind of existence. And it is AWESOME."

"I am sorry but I do not participate in this dead ritual of anonymous ‘peer review’. This dishonest procedure brings out the worst in people. By now we all know that it does not improve quality but merely (re)produces mediocre standards and language. IMHO this format is out of sync with the open access aspects of today’s publishing tools and the debate-focused tools such as blogs, lists and forums, in particular when an article like this aims to contribute to the emerging research on online video. Criticism in the Internet context is a lively entity, not to be dealt with in such a grumpy backroom manner."

"We are often told that the Tea Party Movement represents some sort of disenfranchised “radical middle” in America that rejects both major parties’ inability to get together and solve problems. As the “Contract From America” shows, that’s totally wrong. At least when it comes to policy proposals, these folks are the hard-right wing of the Republican Party, upset that Barry Goldwater’s agenda from 1964 has never been implemented."

"NArray is an Numerical N-dimensional Array class. Supported element types are 1/2/4-byte Integer, single/double-precision Real/Complex, and Ruby Object. This extension library incorporates fast calculation and easy manipulation of large numerical arrays into the Ruby language. NArray has features similar to NumPy, but NArray has vector and matrix subclasses."

"AI4R is a collection of ruby algorithms implementations, covering several Artificial intelligence fields, and simple practical examples using them. A Ruby playground for AI researchers. It implements:…"

"PyMVPA is a Python module intended to ease pattern classification analyses of large datasets. In the neuroimaging contexts such analysis techniques are also known as decoding or MVPA analysis. PyMVPA provides high-level abstraction of typical processing steps and a number of implementations of some popular algorithms. While it is not limited to the neuroimaging domain, it is eminently suited for such datasets. PyMVPA is truly free software (in every respect) and additionally requires nothing but free-software to run."

"“Knowledge only has value if it is emerges into actions, decisions and behaviours – that much is
generally conceded.”

“How will you know you are making it correctly?” “I’ll have to spend a couple of months feeding my family wah kueh, until I get the taste right” she replied. This story, in miniature, is how we actually normally acquire knowledge."

"This is the nightmare scenario if one cares about democracy, because it implies that the apparatus of government is essentially controlled by private interests rather than the common good and the broad interests of society as a whole. It isn't "pluralism", because there are many important social interests not represented in this system in any meaningful way: poor people, non-unionized workers, people without health insurance, inner-city youth, the environment, people exposed to toxic waste, …"

"Hospital-based chaplains and pastoral counselors come up against a fairly brutal form of scientism all the time. In many health care institutions, these people are barely tolerated. They are pointedly not invited to participate in rounds or in patient evaluation sessions. I recall how, as a first-year seminary student doing what is called “supervised ministry” at a New Haven mental health hospital, I was somewhat shocked to see how patients’ behavior was interpreted purely in terms of reactions to their medications, whereas I could see plainly that many of these same patients were responding to the presence or absence of human connection—visits and phone calls from loved ones either made or not made, friendships with other patients either formed or broken."

"Write performance in Cassandra is excellent. The internals are specifically geared towards a heavy-write system. It writes to a memory table and a serial commit log, and every so often the memory table is flushed to disk in what the Big Table paper describes as a sorted strings table, often called an SSTable — an immutable data structure. There is a lot more happening behind the scenes, but the performance characteristics are clear: there is nothing slow in the write path. The Cassandra wiki page on Architecture Internals provides more details."

"Thrift does the heavy lifting. Instead of writing a load of boilerplate code to serialize and transport your objects and invoke remote methods, you can get right down to business. Here is some sample Python client code:"

"Don’t you hate when you can’t remove that file full of cleartext passwords from your github account? Even if you git rm it, it still is accessible in previous versions of the tree. So, you need to rewrite the entire tree. Fortunately, this is really easy with git."