Oh, you two know each other already?
[Happy Labor Day, people. Especially those of you in the Academy, who don't imagine those two fellows are involved in your lofty endeavor.]
Moloch, meet Mammon. Mammon, Moloch.
Reply
Monthly Archives: August 2008
links for 2008-08-31
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"They created the tissue by coating a three-dimensional polymer scaffold with a gene delivery vehicle that encodes a transcription factor known as Runx2. They generated a high concentration of Runx2 at one end of the scaffold and decreased that amount until they ended up with no transcription factor on the other end, resulting in a precisely controlled spatial gradient of Runx2. After that, they seeded skin fibroblasts uniformly onto the scaffold. The skin cells on the parts of the scaffold containing a high concentration of Runx2 turned into bone, while the skin cells on the scaffold end with no Runx2 turned into soft tissue. The result is an artificial bone that gradually turns into soft tissue, such as tendons or ligaments."
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"This conservative myopia dates back to President Reagan, who gutted Jimmy Carter's multibillion-dollar research and development budget for renewables, and ended the tax credits for wind and solar. The sad result is our country is now a bit player in what will probably be one of the biggest job-creating industries of the century, an industry we launched. We had 90 percent of global-installed wind capacity in the 1980s. Today we have one major wind manufacturer, General Electric, with about one-sixth of the market.
Clean energy shouldn't be a partisan issue. But it is. And that means those who who want this country to be a leader in clean energy — those who want to avoid catastrophic global warming and avoid the worst of peak oil — need to start becoming single issue voters."
links for 2008-08-30
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"See yonder!" said Tom, stretching his long arm into infinite space, "see yonder—there's a bee!"
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Can I pay in Social Capital? How about Intellectual Capital??
links for 2008-08-29
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"Librarians are being moved from intermediaries (mediating between patrons and information), and some say they are being disintermediated. However, I think they are on their way to becoming apomediaries when it comes to information access.
Publishers have traditionally been intermediaries between authors and readers, but some experiments (PLoS One, Wikipedia and the like) seem to indicate that they are moving into the realm of serving as apomediaries. In the realm of blogs, apomediation is the main force affecting much of the talent running blogs. Publisher intermediation is not what it once was.
Google is perhaps the most prominent apomediary, guiding results to the top based on apomediation.
Apomediation feels like the net effect of an information economy that no longer operates on a scarcity model. Now, information is readily available any time. Intermediaries will still be needed, but less often than before, in fewer roles, and for shorter durations."
GoPlan is upgefuckt
Laura Fisher plurked the mysterious phrase “mitten is vaguery” earlier this evening. Turns out that in the context of the GoPlan project management site… she’s right.
Seems like some kind of deep but odd database corruption has crept in at GoPlan. Whenever a hyperlink to Laura’s account appears on our project site, my name appears; when a link to me appears, her name shows up. Click “Laura Fisher” and you’ll be emailing me, for example; I edit something and the RSS feed records her as doing it.
She’s nowhere near as wordy or bossy as I am, so this is clearly a mistake.
Update: Tiago Macedo from GoPlan support responds by pointing out that Laura’s account record has my name in it, and my account record has her name in it, so ‘if you change your name everything will be “as expected”.’
And the big question right here is: How did private, session-associated data get mixed up, and how often does that typically happen in a bugless, secure, safe Web application these days?
Scary. Very close to asking for a refund on this one issue. WTF, WeBreakStuff?