December 31, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras as a tool to fine innocent drivers in a game, according to the Montgomery County Sentinel newspaper. Because photo enforcement devices will automatically mail out a ticket to any registered vehicle owner based solely on a photograph of a license plate, any driver could receive a ticket if someone else creates a duplicate of his license plate and drives quickly past a speed camera. The private companies that mail out the tickets often do not bother to verify whether vehicle registration information for the accused vehicle matches the photographed vehicle."
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"When citing Magic 8-Balls:…"
December 30, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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Be braced:
"For someone that has been working building software for the marketing automation industry over 8 years now and is familiar with multiple solutions for finding the right prospect out of many, it was an eye opener. I’m evidencing the progression from mass email campaigns through marketing to target individuals with a matching/relevant offers (data mining, behavioral pattern, collaborate filtering, recommendation engines) to finding customers that can market for you – agents."
December 29, 2008 at 8:04 am · Filed under Project
Why is it that marketing drives people to deface community wikis? To spend their time and attention writing bots to infest Twitter and Facebook and social media generally with artificial “friends”? To hire Indian folks to call me during dinner and pretend to be “Gertrude” or “Molly”? To do that often enough that there is a law against it now, a Do Not Call Registry? To eat 30% of my television time, splattering multiple channels with thousands of copies of the same stupid air-freshener ad every night? What makes engineering professors set up spam blogs full of Markov gibberish to try to game their professional organization’s Google pagerank? Why do algorithms compose and send out the majority of all emails actually sent in the world?
Think about it. I’ll be you are disturbed by or even hate those things, every time they happen to you. Even if you’re one of the people in the marketing business.
Advertising can be subtle, and beautiful. It can be a conversation, a thoughtful image. It can be pleasant, sought-after, a testimonial to the product. It can be polite, opt-in, and complementary.
What makes this other lifestyle viable, the one that we hate? What economic or cultural norm, what law, what incentive exists to make it feasible for otherwise decent human beings to consider costs and benefits and opt to act that way?
That thing, whatever it is, is our enemy.
With few exceptions, I note that it isn’t human beings who are being marketed. It doesn’t seem to be people with names who have ads, spam, phone calls—as long as we count celebrities as non-people (or meta-people). As brands, say.
Maybe that’s a clue.
December 29, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under 105
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This president and everything he has set in place is an embarrassment.
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"Understanding this dynamic — that Americans were divided over how properly to understand “Christianity” — is essential for understanding the political theological problem of the American Founding. The Founders solved it by taking Trinitarian Christianity out of politics and replacing it with “religion” in general, or some more generic kind of “Christianity” that would include basically anything that terms itself “Christianity,” without having to meet any kind of theological test. Hence are the Mormons Christian? Yes. Why? Because they call themselves Christian. That’s what “Americanism” as the Founding Fathers delivered it to us is all about. That the Mormons didn’t exist during the Founding is irrelevant to my point. Substitute for “Mormons” Arians, Socinians, theological Universalists, and the logic stands."
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"Don’t expect it to last, though. As the brands recognize that they are being bilked – rather, that there is at best a tenuous link between consumption of their goods and consumption of the free content they are sponsoring, they will be less likely to foot the bill. For the beneficiaries of free content, the internet is unraveling this whole ecosystem with unwavering speed."
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"The adversarial viewpoint makes you stupid. When viewed adversarially, any idea has crippling disadvantages and no advantages. Contorting your viewpoint enough to make this true damages your ability to conduct research. In short, it promotes poor mental hygiene."
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"The system should produce a consistent level of power throughout the wave motion, over changing wave sizes, and even in storms. Besides generating efficiently and evenly, the simplicity of its design will allow the Ocean Harvester to be easily protected in rough conditions, and make its manufacture impressively cost-efficient."
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"These companies might be pressed into renegotiation, rebidding, cancellation and even fee-recovery, if this practice of abusing emergency overrides can be shown to have a stench of collusion. The possibility of recovering tens of billions of dollars in graft or overcharges should not be overlooked. Moreover, offers of safety and rewards for whistleblowers may put the US government in an unfamiliar position of actually holding the high cards."
December 28, 2008 at 2:02 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"The more complicated cause is the relative difficulty of increasing 'productivity' when the 'product' itself is measured in time. Other than increasing tuition, increasing class size, or decreasing pay, how do you improve the economic 'productivity' of someone teaching 45 hours a semester? When most of the rest of the economy realizes productivity gains every single year and we don't realize any for decades, a funding crunch is utterly predictable. Unless we get away from the 'seat time' model, we'll be stuck in a work-speedup/cost-runup cycle until we simply break the market. Which we're perilously close to doing now."
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"Communicate, communicate, communicate. If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. Vickie Elmer has been interviewing people for an article about changes at The News that’s scheduled to run in the January edition of The Ann Arbor Observer – it’s probably already being delivered to local households. If The News itself had been frank about what’s happening there, she wouldn’t have much of a story to tell. And I would be writing a much different column than the one you’re reading today."
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December 27, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"Agile 2009 will be an exciting international conference about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and first-hand experience, from both the management and technical sides of agile software development. The agile approach focuses on delivering business value early in the project lifetime and being able to incorporate emergent requirements. It accentuates the use of rich, informal communication channels and frequent delivery of running, tested systems, while attending to the human component of software development.
… The conference is not about a single methodology or approach, but rather provides a forum for the exchange of information regarding all agile development technologies."
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"The Twenty-First International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE'09) will be held at the Hyatt Harborside at Boston's Logan Int'l Airport, Boston, USA, July 1-3, 2009.
The conference aims at bringing together experts in software engineering and knowledge engineering to discuss on relevant results in either software engineering or knowledge engineering or both. Special emphasis will be put on the transference of methods between both domains."
December 24, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"It’s christmas, baby, and do we have a present for you. We’re ending the bickering between Merb and Rails with a this bombshell: Merb is being merged into Rails 3!"
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"With the retrenching in Web 2.0 properties – either sites getting bought up and closed down, abandoned by their new owners, orphaned, or mutated beyond recognition in the search for profit, it's time to start looking closely at what kinds of remnant "internet presence" I have lurking on the internets and see about turning off anything that's no longer relevant or up to date. Here's a list of sorts of long-forgotten enthusiasms that should be mercifully excised or republished in some current format."
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"What better reason, then, to sit back and savor the simple enjoyment of a get-together with friends at a hangout like the Chip-in, which Miller thinks is just a formal venue for the kind of casual gatherings that occur all over town."
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"Ernst Haeckel's 1904 "Kunstformen der Natur" [Artforms of Nature] is a classic of biological illustration. What is less generally known is that the artist started as a Christmas card designer. The book was originally simply an album of holiday designs."
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"Evangelical leaders are only beginning to understand this new dynamic and to account for the damage that has been done to the image of Christianity by the politics of division that has been practiced by the Christian Right over the last few decades. In his recent book, Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity, David Kinnaman, the young president of the Barna Group, found that “Christianity has an image problem” among America’s youth (16- to 29-year-olds)."
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"Which means that financially speaking, the spectacularly high dropout rate boils down to a spectacularly bad investment. Though there’s no specific data, one can imagine the countless millions that are wasted financing educations that never come to fruition. We could try to predict which students would be part of the 46% who don’t finish, then encourage those students not to go to college. But to do this would mean a lot of students who might graduate never get to give it a shot. That wouldn’t be fair. So what we can do instead is identify the 5% or 10% of students who are the least likely to graduate, and not send them to college."
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"It is important to keep in mind that cartoon extremes often cloud the debate. How smart is it to advocate open trade when some countries stack the deck by having artificially cheap currencies? That is tantamount to an export subsidy, but we haven't done much except jawbone China very late in the game (and the yen has been awfully cheap until recently too, and Japan has remained an export powerhouse, but we never gave them a hard time due to the sorry state of their domestic economy). Similarly, we consider it completely reasonable to restrict exports of advanced military technology, and acquisition of strategic assets. "
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""These findings suggest that the hospice eligibility criteria of Medicare and other insurers requiring patients to give up cancer treatment contribute to racial disparities in hospice use," the authors wrote. "Moreover, these criteria do not select those patients with the greatest needs for hospice services," they added.
The basis for these disparities is likely related to both cultural differences and economic characteristics. The results from this study indicate that hospice access could be made fairer by using eligibility criteria that are more directly need-based. For example, the investigators suggested that eligibility might be determined by assessing needs for specific hospice services such as pain or symptom management."
December 21, 2008 at 9:34 am · Filed under Tidbits of nanohistory
From Buchanan’s Journal of Man, June 1887:
The air is certainly yet to be navigated when a sufficient amount of power can be concentrated in the machine, but at present we can do little more than float with the wind. It is probable that an engine sufficiently strong, built of the best steel, and propelled by the explosive power of gun cotton, or some similar explosive, would overcome the difficulty. If I were to construct such an engine I would substitute for the lifting power of a balloon that of a sail acting as a kite.
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