"Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the market were nothing but self-published autonomous authors either writing without editorial or paying out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good product mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five seconds before someone came along and said: hey, what if I started a company where we took on all the risk, hired an editorial staff and a marketing staff to make the product better and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a percentage of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk and the initial cost? So writers could, you know, just write?

And writers would line up at their door."

"But how do you present that disclosure? A link in each web article that jumps to a spreadsheet of donors and dollar signs, and let the reader judge? Conversely, many people trust NPR and PBS as a news source, but are satisfied by the simple roll call of sponsors and slogans.

So how do we present this information and context honestly and tactfully? It reminds me of a discussion at ScienceOnline2010 promoting fact-checking policy disclosures. What if you could only afford to fact-check 10% of your reporters’ articles? Does that disclosure give your readers more or less confidence in your service?"

"Several alert readers sent me links to this article from the New York Times. It's a weirdly chipper "pick up some money in your spare time by adjuncting!" piece, written for (and apparently by) people who aren't terribly conversant in higher ed.

Depending on your angle to the universe, it could be read as refreshing, bizarre, or deeply offensive. (I fall into the 'bizarre' camp, with sympathies for the 'deeply offensive.')"

"The 'Primer' is a well-known Life pattern used to calculate prime numbers. The pattern expands in two directions, resembles a breeder, and emits a stream of spaceships representing prime numbers. The presence or absence of a spaceship at a particular generation indicates whether the number is prime or composite. It works by testing whether each integer is divisible by any smaller integer, apart from itself and 1. This is similar in principle to the Sieve of Eratosthenes."

"As Microsoft, Apple, and Google go to war in mobile, search, and on the desktop, expect to see more of this cash deployed through acquisitions. (And one of these days, one of these companies may actually buy something big.)"

"Next time you hear someone invoke "information wants to be free" as a justification for demanding free-as-in-no-payment-expected content, ask them: precisely what content have you released for free lately?"

"If the Internet has a motif, it is rock 'n' roll's Protestant Reformation thrashing against the orchestral One Church. Rock 'n' roll gets lots of wee kirks built in every hill and dale in which parishioners can find religion in their own ways; choral music erects majestic cathedrals that humble and amaze, but take three generations of laborers to build.

The interesting bit isn't what it costs to replicate some big, pre-Internet business or project.

The interesting bit is what it costs to do something half as well as some big, pre-Internet business or project."

dodecahedral LED cap

"The Big Shift suggests we are moving away from a world where stocks of knowledge and short-lived transactions are the key to success. In its place, we find a world where participation in many, diverse flows of knowledge and long-term, trust-based relationships determine success. In this new world, shy people can be at a significant disadvantage. We run the risk of becoming increasingly stressed and marginalized by the extroverts who welcome the opportunity to broaden and deepen relationships. They thrive in crowded rooms while we are deeply uncomfortable with exposing and sharing."

"In their analysis, the old world order based on the imperialist division of the globe into spheres of influence has been superseded by "Empire", a diffuse power emanating not from any one place but, rather, from the network itself."

"While most people don't realize this, they've given Facebook a license to use any content they upload onto Facebook for whatever purpose they choose and the power to transfer that that right as long as the content remains within your profile. They try to make clear what sorts of uses they currently put this license to in order to make their users at ease with posting their content on the service."

"Note that his findings regarding pricing is interesting: he dropped his prices, and is still selling the same number of games, just making half as much money."

"Under the new plan, EWA will immediately shift from a traditional membership organization to an open community, embracing a wider net of people concerned about the quality of education information. The organization will create 21st century mechanisms for supporting traditional writers in real time while adopting creative advocacy on behalf of first-rate sustainable journalism."

"I've used blogs in my classes for five years with university graduate students. I've found them to be extremely helpful in certain circumstances but only when there is clarity for students in their use. Students who object to the inclusion of blogs in a course are usually objecting to what they perceive will be just one more task on top of a myriad of others or simply some busy work that will not benefit their learning. Older students can also reject the notion of "publication" that is inherent with blogging. Each of these objections can be addressed by an effective and innovative instructor by careful planning and skillful management. There are, however, several common mistakes that should be avoided when using blogs in instruction. I have made all of these mistakes and have learned how to address each one proactively."

Want to breed replacements for the models in Section 4

"The problem is that such control makes us all less safe. Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state."

"If you don’t multi-RAW process, you can take photos with immediacy—but you are losing out on a great part of the richness of digital photography.

Let me back up a second to explain what I’m talking about. If you have a DSLR, it can probably be set to save your photos as RAW files, as JPEGs, or as both. RAW files have different file extensions (for example, NEF for Nikon and CR2 or CRW for Canon)—what they have in common is that these files store all the information from the time of exposure.

Essentially, a RAW file is a potentiality rather than a final rendition. Ansel Adams said of his work that a negative was a score, and the print the performance. In much the same way, a RAW file is the score, and what you do with it in the digital darkroom is the performance."

"Finally, the senior NCO said that the private’s rifle was also something else; that because of the biblical quote on the ACOG gunsight it had been “spiritually transformed into the Fire Arm of Jesus Christ” and that we would be expected to kill every “haji” we could find with it. He said that if we were to run out of ammo, then the rifle would become the “spiritually transformed club of Jesus Christ” and that we should “bust open the head of every haji we find with it.’ “He said that Uncle Sam had seen fit not to give us a “pussy ‘Jewzzi’ (combination of the word ‘Jew’ and Israeli made weapon ‘Uzi’) but the “fire arm of Jesus Christ” and made specific mention of the biblical quotes on our gunsights. He said that the enemy no doubt had quotes from the Koran on their guns but that “our Lord is bigger than theirs because theirs is a fraud and an idol”."

"NPR has a nice graphic for where job growth will occur in the next decade based on US Bureau of Labor Statistics data (the NPR site is much cooler than the graphic above). Now, operations research is a little small to appear as a dot on its own, but if you look at that little dot far to the right, showing the most job growth? That is “Management, Scientific, and Technical Consulting Services”. And what field is all of “management, scientific and technical”? Operations Research, of course! The projection is for 82.8% growth."

"As of January 2010, the duration of the current recession stands at 25 months and counting. By lasting this long, it has vaulted into 5th place on the career list, surpassing the 24-month long recession of January 1910 to January 1912. It’s the Ken Griffey of recessions. Next one in our sights is the 32-month long post-Civil War recession that ran from April 1865 to December 1867."

"Email is still the easiest way to collaborate with a group of people.
We built tgethr in response to the increasingly complex world of online collaboration. Why set up a project management site or an entire social network when all you need is to correspond by email more efficiently?"

"We're planning a Pivotal Tracker upgrade on Jan 23. As part of this release, we will be introducing a new API version (V3), which will make it easier to follow project activity, allow you to add file attachments, move (re-prioritize) stories, associate source commits with stories, and more."

"The goal is not to make your user interface as realistic as possible. The goal is to add those details which help users identify what an element is, and how to interact with it, and to add no more than those details. UI elements are abstractions which convey concepts and ideas; they should retain only those details that are relevant to their purpose. UI elements are almost never representations of real things. Adding too much realism can cause confusion."

"That insight led Mr. Martin to begin advocating what was then a radical idea in business education: that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions."

"The row that developed around the Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer tête-à-tête was sadly misguided. Mainly pushed by media outlets who don’t understand the whole point of The Daily Show and the subversive reality of the show’s irony. The Daily Show succeeds because it is the only show on which views from outside the sphere of legitimate debate can be aired and find an audience. It’s comedic basis disarms the critics."

"The Commission’s resolution also included a call for ODOT to attend their next meeting on February 2 (9 am at City Hall) to discuss the benefits of a bike/ped path included in the bid process. ODOT will release the RFQ that same day, so Brown pointed out that the resolution and alternative technical specification in the RFQ will have to be sent to ODOT this week. ODOT will host a meeting for parties interested in designing the Innerbelt Bridge on Feb. 9. Kuri asked if this was a public meeting (and offered after that a group of advocates might consider forming as a design ‘firm’ to bid on the project – for at least the purpose of attending the Feb. 9 meeting. The guidlines for bidding on the Innerbelt Bridge can be found here.)"

"The idea is that the researchers that rely on computational techniques as part of their day-to-day activities need an entire "reproducible research system" that will make it easier for them to document the sources of their data and the analyses performed on it. The system they've designed shares features with rapid application development environments, as it graphically represents modular computational tools, which can be ordered to create an analysis pipeline, and the individual settings for each can be tweaked. Once complete, the user can trigger the analysis to run; the system documents all of the relevant settings and software information."

"Every user who participated in the meme is represented by a gray circle (Matt, whom first started the meme, is shown in yellow). Edges represents the person who most likely influenced the other to first participate."

"What does this mean to you?

If you currently receive Time Inc. or Forbes periodical content electronically from Gale or any provider other than EBSCO, you and your patrons will lose access to that content over the next year. While there will remain alternative, high-quality titles in all information providers' products, there will be an impact on users, especially those who access content through long-term statewide subscriptions."

"How can we control quality on the Internet?"

"Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher's Weekly that "publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy" comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were "loaned" last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself."

"This looks a whole lot like the initializer block in Rails 2.3, but the Application object, not a global configuration object, now has the configuration information. Similarly, routes.rb now begins YourApp::Application.routes.draw. The application object lives in the center of Railties in Rails 3, providing a core object that the rest of the frameworks can build on."

"Since the launch of DataSF last summer, the City’s clearinghouse of government datasets, we have seen our tech community create new services and products never dreamed of within the walls of government. And now we are giving people access to technology systems like our 311 call center through open source, so they can decide how and when they interact with government.

We face many challenges today, none more urgent than the economic crisis, but with it comes an opportunity to seek new ways of governing. In San Francisco, like other cities, we are using this opportunity to engage our greatest resource, the public, to build a government that works better for all of us."

"Each of the presenters gave a nice, thoughtful, 5-minute talk about their views on the issue, but what everyone was waiting for was the fireworks when open discussion began. For a while the discussion was tame enough, with everyone exchanging platitudes about how they view the issues. But then things got a LOT more heated…."

"Creation spaces have the potential to generate increasing returns — the more participants that join, the faster new knowledge gets created and the more rapidly performance improves. They bring into play network effects in the generation of new knowledge. In contrast, traditional knowledge management systems are inherently diminishing returns propositions. Since existing knowledge is by definition limited, it requires more and more effort to squeeze the next increment of performance improvement as existing knowledge gets more broadly distributed."

"See SVG Overview for lots of good reasons that you should use SVG."

"In this post I present the development model that I’ve introduced for all of my projects (both at work and private) about a year ago, and which has turned out to be very successful. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but I’ve never really found the time to do so thoroughly, until now. I won’t talk about any of the projects’ details, merely about the branching strategy and release management."

"In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized– connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why.
It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”"

"In 1903, Crayola had eight colors in its standard package. Today, there are 120, along with special packs like Gem Tones and Silver Swhirls. What happened? Above, from Weather Sealed, shows the growing color selection (and a few color retirements) in the standard package from 1903 to now."