February 28, 2009 at 2:13 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"Yet before our eyes, another reality is emerging – or rather re-emerging, because it once served humanity for centuries. That reality is the commons, which derives from a different side of human nature, and therefore operates on different principles than the market supposedly does. That other side is not the sappy, self-sacrificing altruist that marketophiles posit as the only alternative to their model of human behavior. Nor is it the grim utilitarian socialist. Rather, it is whatever resides in us that wants to be engaged with and around other people – whether to accomplish a task or just because it is fun.
This convivial side of economic life is beyond the bandwidth of most economic thought. The corporate market tends to repress it, and partly for that very reason it has been fighting its way back through the concrete. Cyberspace and the World Wide Web gave it a vast and unenclosed new realm, much as the New World once did for the surging energies of Old Europe…."
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"Very frequently I hear or read of my artifacts adjudged by critics as being "failures," because I did not get them into mass-production and "make money with them." Such money-making-as-criteria-of-success critics do not realize that money-making was never my goal. I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive."
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"The particular dilemma, at this point, boils down to which part of 'unsustainable contract' trumps the other. UF is claiming, correctly, that the current fiscal shortfall demands some level of sacrifice. Babb and the union are claiming, correctly, that a contract is a contract.
Both sides are right, but if they've retreated to such intractable positions they've both already lost. If the University 'wins,' I'd expect 'stars' to start decamping for greener pastures as soon as the market improves, since they'd be afraid that promises are written in sand. If Babb 'wins,' the University will have to take out its cuts instead on those least able to fight back – it's not like the fiscal crisis will just go away — and the anti-public-education conservatives will have their latest Ward Churchill to use as a battering ram. Either result is ugly."
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"So for our inaugural Wiki Wednesday, we start with names. ArborWiki has articles about the Ann Arbor City Council, the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority, and the Downtown Development Authority. Those articles include lists of current councilmembers and board members, respectively.
But who served on those bodies before the current casts of characters?"
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"You didn't have the time to read the 1100 page stimulus bill. And neither did members of Congress—by their own choice. Most lawmakers—on both sides of the aisle—were only given 13 hours to read the bill before it was passed."
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"Foolish reliance on Li's model lead to disaster and it was made possible by CDS markets which convinced participants that they had many observations on the probability of default. They were convinced that prices revealed these probabilities because they had an insane mystical faith in the strong form efficient markets hypothesis and a schizophrenic simultaneous belief that they could beat the market."
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"So what should Alex do? Continuously deploy. Every commit should be instantly deployed to production. Let’s walk through her story again, assuming she had such an ideal implementation of Continuous Deployment.
Alex commits. Minutes later warnings go off that the cluster is no longer healthy. The failure is easily correlated to Alex’s change and her change is reverted. Alex spends minimal time debugging, finding the now obvious typo with ease. Her changes still caused a failure cascade, but the downtime was minimal. "
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"Assuming you're with me so far, what will that mean in practice? Throwing out a lot of code. That's because as you get better at continuous deployment, you learn more and more about what works and what doesn't. If you're serious about learning, you'll continuously learn to prune the dead weight that doesn't work. That's not entirely without risk, which is a lesson we learned all-too-well at IMVU. Luckily, Chad Austin has recently weighed in with an excellent piece called 10 Pitfalls of Dirty Code."
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"OneSwarm is a new P2P data sharing application we’re building to provide users with explicit control over their privacy by enabling fine-grained control over how data is shared. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth. We call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing. OneSwarm is:…"
February 27, 2009 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We have a Citi MasterCard that was one of the (apparently) hundreds of thousands whose security was compromised in the recent Heartland Security Breach.
I’d heard the news about the breach, but the first sign I had that we were involved was when I tried to use the card for an online purchase. No email, no phone call, nothing from Citi regarding the problem. When the transaction failed three or four times I knew it wasn’t the vendor website’s fault, so I checked my Citi account online. There I saw a bright red warning that my account had been shut down because of risk of compromise.
When I called (this was back on February 20th or so, I think) to complain about the lack of notice, the customer service representative explained that Citi had no time or resources to notify all the cardholders, especially given the scale of the possible breach, but had rather acted to place all the possibly compromised accounts on hold as soon as they could. I was told they had issued new cards with new account numbers, at no charge to any of us, and that the new card would be here shortly.
Well, we got the new card, and we activated it and set up online access.
Interesting thing we discover, which (aside from the general lack of coverage of the Heartland fiasco in the press and blogosphere) is why I’m bothering to write this: a strange charge we didn’t recognize, with code TOTAL SEC BALANCE TRANSFR-ITEMIZED. The amount charged ($99) was the same as the new charges that had accrued on the old account before the transfer, but “99″ is one of those numbers that makes you wonder about intentional design. In any case, this clearly implied we had either been double-charged, or charged an extra and unauthorized $99 fee.
So I got back on the phone and called customer service just now, and spoke with Jim. He explained to me that TOTAL SEC BALANCE TRANSFR-ITEMIZED was a “system message”, which represented (as it seemed) the sum of items booked to the old closed account just before the new one was set up. He explained it was an “accounting quirk in their system”, and that it would disappear at the beginning of the next billing cycle. Merchants had authorized $99 worth of charges right before the account was closed and balances were transferred, and the mysterious line item indicated the transition from “authorization” to actual charge. Jim explained that generally this transition removes the authorization charge from the billing system, but because the account changed in the interim period, the charge accrued on the new account but the authorization couldn’t be removed from the old one (or something like that). He pointed out (very helpfully) that if my card had been misplaced or stolen, the same dynamics would have kicked in there, too, and the same sort of transactions would have happened.
This got me thinking. It may be ephemeral, a “quirk of the system”, but nonetheless on the books and until the authorization is cleared I owe an extra $99 to Citi. It’s mere coincidence of timing that our account came to $99. But it seems highly likely (given the several-days typical delay between authorization and charge in many merchants’ transactions) that any regular cardholder might have one or more transactions spanning a period like this.
So here we have hundreds of thousands, or millions of credit card accounts, all compromised and all synchronously being transferred to new accounts. What fraction of those had interrupted transactions spanning the synchronized transfer, resulting in these TOTAL SEC BALANCE TRANSFR-ITEMIZED “system messages”?
The numbers are hard for me to even estimate with the information I have on hand (though Jim did allow it was “really a lot” of cards). Seems big.
The thing I have to wonder about is: just at this crucial juncture in the financial crisis, when the company is under the closest scrutiny in decades and the stock is suffering from massive loss of investor faith, Citi has double-booked a sizable Accounts Receivable sum.
And probably not just Citi….
February 27, 2009 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"In the next series of posts, I'll use examples to describe the 4 (maybe 5) sub-networks in a truly transformative philanthropy network. I'll offer a graphic that will show each part and then how they all fit together."
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"So again, the foundation can help the collaboratives process what is happening – in real time as they "rapid prototype" – and make sense of what is happening. Does what they are doing feel like its going in the right direction? What have they been surprised about? What did they notice? What do they need to learn about? Who can they learn that from? For this kind of learning to lead to breakthroughs, the foundation as network guardian will need to make sure the reflection process includes participants and observers as well as the organizational staff. "
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"When I first started writing, one of the pieces of advice that I heard was that you should always imagine that you are writing to a particular person. It gets your juices going – you’re automatically in an explanatory state of mind and you know what you can expect from your audience. I was doing that, but I noticed that I was drifting. I was losing my sense of audience. I started to explain one thing, and then I realized that I would have to explain something else to help it make sense. I couldn’t imagine that person any more. How could I know what they know and what they don’t?"
February 26, 2009 at 2:13 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"How are you with a mop?"
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"1. Repetition is the soul of the net. If I've told you this once, I've said it a thousand times. Every year, regular as clockwork, there is an audience for people reading about where to pick blueberries, how to get election returns, who makes the best paczki, what to do on your birthday or your kids birthday. You get a free pass to repeat your good content over and over again annually, do it."
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It's still fun when I hear important people saying stuff I said years ago, and having people listen to them ad think it's so cool and insightful. Really.
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"Tabletop gamers want different things, different kinds of fun, out of their games. However, it’s often tricky to discuss that, when a lot of the common terms add up to “munchkin” and “actor”, and other categories that oversimplify what people actually want out of their play. So, if your group wants to have a discussion without that clutter, and get a solid grip on what each person at the table wants from play, here are some less-simple, less-snarky terms."
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"I am mainly interested in how scientific method could possibly lead us to true generalizations about Nature; generalizations that extend infinitely beyond our current, finite perspective. Standard philosophy of science sidesteps this question by asking, instead, about the meanings of "justification" and "rationality" a different matter entirely. I put the former question front and center, so that methodological normativity must be traced back to truth-finding efficacy, rather than to sociological generalizations about scientific practice. In this respect, my approach to epistemology closely parallels work in theoretical computer science and the foundations of mathematics, in which the central question is existence of a reliable procedure for finding the right answer to a question. The shift in emphasis results in a fresh, new perspective on a number of standard issues in epistemology and the philosophy of science, such as:…"
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"The damage was foreseeable and, in fact, foreseen. In 1998, before Li had even invented his copula function, Paul Wilmott wrote that "the correlations between financial quantities are notoriously unstable." Wilmott, a quantitative-finance consultant and lecturer, argued that no theory should be built on such unpredictable parameters. And he wasn't alone. During the boom years, everybody could reel off reasons why the Gaussian copula function wasn't perfect. Li's approach made no allowance for unpredictability: It assumed that correlation was a constant rather than something mercurial. Investment banks would regularly phone Stanford's Duffie and ask him to come in and talk to them about exactly what Li's copula was. Every time, he would warn them that it was not suitable for use in risk management or valuation…"
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"Some of the claims here are sketchy — Geocities as a precursor to blogging? Really? — and suffer from web-centrism. After all, the world wide web was one of the LEAST interesting or effective things on the internet to spend your time on in the mid-1990s; usenet and email, which was mostly done over PINE or ELM servers in terminal clients, were where it was at. (I had a proto-blog my freshman and sophomore years of college whose “subscribers” were people in my email address book — most of whom were friends-of-friends I didn’t know.) All the same, it’s worth reading and remembering a little of what it was all like."
February 25, 2009 at 2:13 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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I would love to believe that totally ripping off copyrighted material in a design that is <i>available for public use right now</i> isn't a stupid, hamhanded, self-destroying instance of outright copyright infringement and bad design. But I'm not seeing the argument.
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"“What becomes clear to participants is we are facing some major economic and ecological changes,” said Andree Zaleska from the Boston office of Institute for Policy Studies, who is coordinating clubs in the Northeast. “We are not going back to some golden age of economic growth based on empire, unfettered capitalism, and cheap energy—nor do we want to! We have to prepare ourselves and our communities for transformation.”"
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"Yet Clojure offers many advantages over its dialectical ancestors. The first is immutable data structures. This forces you to think about everything as input and output (good for modeling) while making it easier to think and reason about (good for understanding your model) your program. The differentiation that Clojure makes between identity and state is also a good fit for modeling. Clojure is also built for a concurrent world. Clojure can handle a lot of different parts of a program simultaneously reading and writing changes to the world, allowing you to focus on each part of your system as individuals rather than worrying about the mechanics of making them all work together. Clojure also keeps vectors and hash tables as built-in, both convenient data structures for modeling tasks."
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"Simon Caulkin wrote a powerful article attacking this debased from of corporate Darwinism recently. In it, he wrote: “Bastardized and coarsened, the concept of “the survival of the fittest” (a phrase only later adopted by Darwin from Herbert Spencer) has powerfully shaped modern business. The robber barons of the early 20th century quickly latched on to the self-serving idea that “might is right”—cut-throat economic competition was the normal state of affairs and the rise to the top of the strongest was part of natural law and the inevitable outcome of history.”"
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"Retro-Futurist Micro-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism"
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"I see pairing work so well every day that I consider my career prior to my current job to have consisted mostly of wasting time. When I think back to all the code I’ve written for a job, I’m annoyed at how much less efficient I was then since I wasn’t pairing, and how much better my code and my products would have been if I had paired on them full time."
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"FlickrEdit is a Java Desktop application that allows you to display and edit your photos in a variety of ways. It also allows you to download/backup or upload your photos to and from Flickr. FlickrEdit is written in Java and it uses flickrj framework to access Flickr.
FlickrEdit uses Java Web Start to run and update the application (Wikipedia info on JWS). Click Below to Launch FlickrEdit!"
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"I’m continually amazed at the number of people that fear free digital content, believing that free digital content now will ultimately lead people to believe that all content is without value, that all consumers of books will somehow refuse to pay for digital content. The conflation of free and digital is one that is tossed around frequently, often based on the decreasing revenues of print newspapers and their inability to leverage or monetize their digital content. However, I don’t believe that the format defines whether content has value. The format might change the amount of the value expressed in monetary terms but I don’t necessarily believe that the digital form of content equals free. "
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"Most large organizations have a "top-down" central planning function, although they operate externally within a "bottom-up" (market) economy. As the business environment becomes more complex, top-down planning systems have been hard pressed to adequately understand and effectively respond to the quickly-developing challenges.
To cope with the complexity, some leading organizations are introducing more market-based BI systems to help with organizational decision-making. One of the emerging practices is called, prediction markets."
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"Distributed Proofreaders is an online community of proofreaders who strive to make Project Gutenberg the repository of the best free electronic books available. At any moment, hundreds of volunteers are working on different phases of saving history, one page at a time. Learn more by visiting www.pgdp.net or our newest site, www.pgdpcanada.net"
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"You can talk about professions being demoralized, in both senses of the word. Medicine is a deeply moral profession, but have the incentives (and disincentives) of the medical-industrial complex been chipping away at that foundation?
Banking once had a moral dimension. Is that even detectable anymore? Are there bankers at Citigroup who still see themselves fundamentally as stewards? Or is that species extinct?"
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"Other communities across the country are beginning to create alternative ways of living. In Milwaukee, a renaissance has begun, sparked by the two-acre farm of former basketball player Will Allen, who recently received a MacArthur Genius award. “We have to go back to when people shared things and started taking care of each other,” Allen said recently. “That’s the only way we will survive. What better way to do it than with food?”"
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"…Nowadays, when I go into teams, especially teams in large organizations, what I am hearing from people is “At least work doesn’t suck now as much as it used to”. Which somehow seems less of an important thing to devote your life to creating: “He helped work suck a little less, but it still sucked”. The micro scale is intended to connote that we need to re-focus our attention on the people inside the team, on their happiness and on their success, and on empowering them and in particular we should stop hoping that someone in the organization the powers that be will reach down and give us permission to do Agile, give us permission to do reasonable things, help us out, we need to focus on the individual one to one scale which is where living a useful life lies."
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"A successful essay is a clear and compelling piece of writing that explores a topic important to the software community. The subject area should be interpreted broadly, including the relationship of software to human endeavors, or its philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical, or anthropological underpinnings. An essay can be an exploration of its topic, its impact, or the circumstances of its creation; it can present a personal view of what is, explore a terrain, or lead the reader in an act of discovery; it can be a philosophical digression or a deep analysis. It can describe a personal journey, perhaps that by which the author reached an understanding of such a topic."
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"Holy shit. Anything with “capacitance-sensing whiskers and shape-memory alloy actuators” is more than fine by me"
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"So, in summary– a drop in classification error on test data from .941 to .078. Thats a 17% drop. (Or a 21% drop, depending upon which rate you use as a base.) This from a method that you can implement in basically zero extra work if you already have a linear classifier. Seems worth a try."
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"Haml and Sass are templating engines for the two most common types of documents on the web: HTML and CSS, respectively. They are designed to make it both easier and more pleasant to code HTML and CSS documents, by eliminating redundancy, reflecting the underlying structure that the document represents, and providing elegant, easily understandable, and powerful syntax."
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"Open source healthcare is forging forward quickly on the Internet. But, fast developments often produce many failures. But, many medicinal open source projects that have gained success development. This success shows that open source alone is not the solitary factor in development. Instead, look to great management, public relations, marketing and a sound program that stands up under the scrutiny of a growing number of peer users and, often, patients."
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"Spending your days doing grunt work for people who are smarter than you. Obsessing over their mood and personal problems. Turning down all opportunities to take credit or get attention so you can continue to work as a servant. Does this really sound like a job you want?
Probably not. Few people are cut out for it. It’s really hard. It’s incredibly stressful. It’s not at all glamorous.
But it’s vitally important. A team without a manager is doomed to be an ineffective team. So if you can’t do it, find somebody else."
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"I have no idea what the interviewer’s expectations are, so I have to guess. I have, essentially, a 50/50 shot at guessing correctly. To make matters worse, my answer will likely go through a number of different interviewers, and I have a 50/50 shot at having guessed correctly with each of them. Assuming that a single “no” from one of the interviewers means I don’t get a job offer, having 2 interviewers gives me a 25% chance of success. Three interviewers gives me a 12.5% chance. A team of 6 or 7 interviewers (extremely common in up-and-coming companies) gives me virtually no chance at all."
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Stalin is extremely slow to compile. In principle this isn’t a big deal: you can debug using a different scheme compiler. Still, Stalin seems to be somewhat less robust to edge cases, than at least chicken scheme.
It is amazing that Scheme code with no type declarations can beat C by almost a factor of 2.
Though in principle Stalin produces intermediate c code, it is utterly alien and low-level. I have not been able to determine exactly what options Stalin is using when it calls gcc on the source code. That could account for some of the difference.
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"Then, to display the timeline_events, you'll need an association on your User model. We've frequently defined this as a has_many :through followed items, like how you might imagine it's implemented in the github activity feed. Then, in your dashboards/show.html.erb, you'd have something like this."
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"Jindal believes that this grandstanding–at the expense of the interests of the people who elected him–will raise his chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. I urge all Republicans to reflect that political loyalty ought to run both ways: a politician–like Jindal–who has no loyalty to his supporters who voted for him is not a politician whom any voter has any business supporting."
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"Private equity and venture capital to major countries has slowed or fallen in recent quarters, although the long term still looks promising. Ajay Shah, a senior fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, calls India a “pre-modern market economy” that lacks a well-integrated bond market and other financial infrastructure to move money quickly into the system. Large conglomerates such as Tata and other Top 100 firms in India “will tap into all types of cash you’ve never heard of,” he says. But other companies –- especially family-run firms that lack diverse products –- cannot find debt capital and are being pounded by “unprecedented negative shocks to cash flow.”"
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"… For some reason, Google has scanned two versions of my book American Sympathy, and its database doesn't seem to know they're the same book. Moreover, it also has a reference to what seems to be a free-standing copy of one of my book's chapters, not yet digitized, which I never published separately. I claimed that, too. And I claimed an "insert" in a scholarly anthology that reprints a journal article that overlaps a great deal with one of the book's chapters. I know for a fact that no one else has any right to that insert. Google's instructions say that if an insert reprints material also published in a book, the author should only claim either the book or the insert, but not both. Well, that makes sense as far as the lump payments go. But if Google is later going to sell ads on webpages or sell downloads, it doesn't make sense…."
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In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe," Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
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"If I get enough named supporters so it looks like a real show of force, I’ll include the list in the spot at the bottom. If I don’t get a big response, I’ll probably leave the list of supporters off. Either way, your expression of support will be appreciated.
Note that I am very upset over the proposed rule and the text and tone of my comment reflects this as best I know how without using profanity. And the proposal deserves profanity. If you work for an alphabet organization or otherwise have a relationship with the TSA that requires not angering the TSA, this is not the comment with which you want to be associated. Only the brave and the independent need sign up here."
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"American law does not similarly protect the moral rights of its authors. In fact, it has a legal convention called "work-for-hire" that is to moral rights what peonage is to citizenship. If you sign a contract with a "work-for-hire" clause, you agree that what you've written is a thing without any more integrity than a lump of coal, and that the purchaser can do whatever he wants to it, editorially, without any need to consult you, and that no matter how much or under what circumstances the work is republished, you have no rights to demand further payment. In my opinion, work-for-hire contracts are disreputable acts of force majeure on the part of publishers. Nonetheless, it is almost impossible for a novice writer to avoid signing them, and in the last few years, it has been difficult even for established writers to avoid them…"
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"If sites really needed permission to link to others, the Web would be a very different place. It's hard to imagine there would be a Gawker, or for that matter a TMZ, a Wikipedia, or anywhere else that embarrasses the subjects of posts. In another example of an effort to stop linking, a city lawyer in Sheboygan, Wis., demanded that blogger (and political critic) Jennifer Reisinger remove from her site a link to the police department. Reisinger has sued various city officials for violating her First Amendment free speech rights. Her case is pending in federal district court in Wisconsin. Let's hope the judge in Reisinger's cases sees linking differently than Judge Darrah did. If cases like these come out the wrong way, the Internet could go from a Web to a series of one-way roads."
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"Following the completion of the process, all of the individual budgets were aggregated into one single “Citizen’s Budget”, which gave a clear picture of the participants’ wishes for the 2009/2010 municipal budget.
Overall, 1800 citizens registered to use the website, with 1291 writing individual budgets (750 of whom provided written justifications). Although this is less than 1% of the city’s population (217 000), it still represents a sevenfold increase over the roughly 150-200 citizens who might show up for an offline, townhall consultation process."
February 24, 2009 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"Would it be possible to ask the companies who participate in the go!pass program to tell you which go!passes are being distributed to (i) people who are too poor to drive and (ii) criminals who have had their licenses taken away?
It would be great to be able to study the bus boarding patterns of the poor people versus the criminals."
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"I think we can see in these moves a common historical pattern: when the structures that give a powerful institution strength start to weaken, it reaches for a new level of authority not based in the previous structure and therefore not susceptible to weakening."
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"What makes this case particularly nasty is that a large company successfully forced its will on another company based solely on a specious claim of trademark infringement. The next step for an ambitious company, of course, is to demand further control over how a site links to its content. After all, if you can get a judge who doesn't seem to understand the concept of hyperlinking, who knows what you can get away with under the guise of trademark infringement."
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"Along the same lines, Obama forgets—or neglects—that the Civil Rights movement not only called on America to live up to its constitutional promises of equality; it called on American citizens to enter into a new way of relating to one another. It did so with a constant impatience with the way things were, a relentless, increasingly radical unwillingness to accept the status quo that would quite disturb Obama the bipartisan peacemaker."
February 23, 2009 at 2:02 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"Another common thread in the grad students’ stories was dissuasion, both passive and active, from engagement with the digital. From bureaucratic hassles to tepid advising to being actually barred from computing facilities built for faculty (think about that for a moment; it’s appalling on so very many levels), the message goes out loud and clear: technology is a toy, it’s a diversion, it’s fine for the classroom, but it’s not how you do your work."
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"So why is Linux everywhere, and we only hear about 386BSD in historical contexts? There is exactly one answer, and it's what Eric Raymond was really talking about in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. TCatB has been seen mostly as an argument for open-source versus commercial software, but what Raymond saw was that the real competition comes down to an open contribution model versus closed contributions. Linus' promiscuous contribution policy simply let Linux out-evolve 386BSD. More contributors meant more drivers, more bug fixes, more enhancements… more ideas, ultimately. Two people, no matter how talented, cannot outcode thousands of Linux contributors. The best programmers are 10 times more productive than the average, and I would rate Bill and Lynne among the very best. But, as of last April, the Linux Foundation reported that more than 3,600 people had contributed to the kernel alone."
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"Architects, designers, and developers of corporate systems usually have little or no voice in what gets built, or how, or why. (Imagine the average IT department meeting where one developer says this system really ought to be built using Scala and Lift.) The don't sign on, they get assigned. I know that individual developers do care passionately about their work, but usually have no way to really make a difference.
The net result is that corporate software is software that nobody gives a shit about: not it's creators, not it's investors, and not it's users."
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"But alas, it does not. In fact and here is the crucial point, tenure doesn’t enable academic freedom, there is no such thing as academic freedom, what tenure does is farm the decision of academic freedom out to other bodies. A majority of institutions make tenure decisions based on publishing record, in other words forces outside the institution which are making market decisions based on what can be profitably sold as an intellectual commodity (usually in book form) are deciding what academics can and cannot say."
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"Fortunately, we are not yet “perfected” consumers but if we are not vigilant, our attention span will continue to shrink, and those available conveniences that help us force more and more material through our tiny pinhole of focus will proliferate. (Just as road-building worsens traffic problems, media-management and organization tools tend to exacerbate our attention problems. Hence, I spend as much time editing metadata as I do concentrating on music I’m listening to.)"
February 22, 2009 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"When viewed in development mode, the person div would be overlaid with a translucent gray box with the words “Milestone 6” in it, as shown below."
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"We’ve been writing a “feature” for every new client request on that project – for each user-created ticket we handle, we create a .feature file (and include the ticket number in the feature title), and write steps for that request. This means that we have acceptance tests for all new client requests on that project. This approach may seem a little strange, but it’s been helpful, and we’re very happy with it so far. We’ll likely take a different approach if we use Cucumber on a project from scratch.
Now you have no excuse if your projects aren’t doing any kind of top-down testing, so get out there and write some acceptance tests!"
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"The Shoulda gem makes it easy to write elegant, understandable, and maintainable Ruby tests. Shoulda consists of test macros, assertions, and helpers added on to the Test::Unit framework. It’s fully compatible with your existing tests, and requires no retooling to use."
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"The second thing you need to do is push your uncertainty threshold.
We all have a certain limit, or threshold, for the amount of uncertainty we can handle. For some of us, we have such a low limit, we’re afraid of even simple things, like talking to a stranger. We can’t predict what the person we’ll say, so we can’t tolerate the uncertainty. This is on the lower end of the spectrum. The higher end of the scale might be not being able to quit your job and follow your passion. There’s no way you can foresee what will happen, so you let uncertainty keep you from taking action."
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"Unions paved the way to the middle class for millions of American workers and pioneered benefits such as paid health care and pensions along the way. Even today, union workers earn significantly more on average than their non-union counterparts, and union employers are more likely to provide benefits. And non-union workers—particularly in highly unionized industries—receive financial benefits from employers who increase wages to match what unions would win in order to avoid unionization."
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"This experience has also altered my view of blogging and research. On one hand, I’m very enthusiastic about research in general, and my research in particular, where we are regularly cracking conventionally impossible problems. On the other hand, it seems that some small number of people viewing a discussion silently decide they don’t like it, and veto it given the opportunity. It only takes one to turn strong paper into a years-long odyssey, so public discussion of research directions and topics in a vetocracy is akin to voluntarily wearing a “kick me” sign. While this a problem for me, I expect it to be even worse for the members of a vetocracy in the long term."
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"Grad school was even worse. At that level, a self-selected bunch of failure avoiders competed for faculty approval in a pretty airless environment for years. By the end, it took an act of will just to put together a declarative sentence. The most damning insult in grad school was “naive,” which was typically applied to anyone who actually made some sort of positive claim. (“Naive realism” was the worst, since it implied the unforgivable sin of claiming to actually know something about something.) Self-doubt can be taught.
In grad school, too, I recall the faculty being perplexed as to why so many doctoral students seemed oddly hesitant and overly deferential during oral exams. At one panel of grad student papers, I recall noticing that every single grad student started her presentation with “this is a work in progress.” Translated, that means “please don't attack me.” These habits are learned…."
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"… The notanemployee example helps these people to know that some people are declaring that the types of relationships in business are no longer restricted to being hierarchical, and that we can make a choice. And, that independents can work together to help the people who hire them understand that they can get a competitive edge by not trying to control those people who choose to work with them. This makes for better relationships, more adaptability and flexibilty, a higher chance of success. This is a realistic pathway for people to begin to have the freedom to start building systems that are commons and peer-based. 20 years ago, it was unheard of for independent business people to work together closely on creating an ecolgy of trust, mutual respect, and learning/participation commons."
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"The Xquartz project is an open-source effort to develop a version of the X.org X Window System that runs on Mac OS X. Together with supporting libraries and applications, it forms the X11.app that Apple has shipped with OS X since version 10.5."
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"Here’s what duplication removal does, structurally. It allows you to pull out redundant bits of pulp from big sections, yielding smaller sections, but the side effect is that you end up with more fascia. Duplication removal increases the ratio of fascia to pulp. If the amount of pulp you are able to remove exceeds the size of the fascia you introduce, the net amount of code decreases, otherwise it might increase.
In general, I think that a high fascia to pulp ratio is better for maintenance. It gives us is a higher surface area to volume ratio for our code. This can enhance testability and make it easier to compose new software – we already have smaller more understandable pieces."
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"This may all sound sinister and manipulative, but the impulse behind it is getting people past the blinders that inhibit them from helping to shape the solution. The point is to enable a constructive kind of academic citizenship, rather than the usual dichotomy of either apathy or total war. Once they grasp the contours of what we're up against, they're in a position to craft actual solutions, and to defend their own interests more effectively. I want that to happen, since I can't help but think that we're smarter together than separately."
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"…But for banking we do need an Atabeg. He (the kind of person we're looking for will probably be male) should work out of a complex of silk tents in Wyoming, which shivering suppliants must reach on foot. The bankers and, why not, derivatives traders should plead for mercy under the horsetail banners streaming in the steppe wind, close to the white pyramid of bleached skulls."
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"I recently got back reviews of a paper in which I used automatic differentiation. Therein, a reviewer clearly thought I was using finite difference, or “numerical” differentiation. This has led me to wondering: Why don’t machine learning people use automatic differentiation more? Why don’t they use it…constantly? Before recklessly speculating on the answer, let me briefly review what automatic differentiation (henceforth “autodiff”) is. Specifically, I will be talking about reverse-mode autodiff."
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"Call to Action: We therefore urge every U.S. law school to commit to ending print publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print."
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""We've decided to close your office. We think we might be able to find you another job. Hmmmm….maybe. Not sure about your staff and patients, but maybe. We'll see. Gotta go HIRE SOME CARDIOLOGISTS!" (I'm soooooooooooo not kidding.) "Thanks for taking it on the chin and not crying like a girl! I'll be in touch soon, I promise. Bye. Can't keep the heart guys waiting.""
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"I wish you had omitted . . . all those Expressions of Resentment against your Adversaries. . . . In such Cases, the noblest Victory is obtained by Neglect, and by Shining On."
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"Now, I’m in no position to refute those figures, but I don’t think it takes an economics expert to look at them and realise why the publishers are struggling at the moment; if their analysis people can only shave off $2 per unit by removing the printing, shipping, warehousing and remaindering from the equation, then there’s a business model that was on shaky ground before the ebook entered the picture. I suspect the bits I’ve bolded are where the haemorrhaging could be stemmed most effectively."
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"A buccaneer-scholar is anyone whose love of learning is not muzzled, yoked or shackled by any institution or authority; whose mind is driven to wander and find its own voice and place in the world."
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[indirect but key]
"Practice, practice, practice!
Don't confuse experience with expertise.
Don't trust folklore — but learn it anyway.
Take nothing on faith. Own your methodology.
Drive your own education — no one else will.
Reputation = Money. Build and protect your reputation.
Relentlessly gather resources, materials, and tools.
Establish your standards and ethics.
Avoid certifications that trivialize the craft.
Associate with demanding colleagues.
Write, speak, and always tell the truth as you see it."
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"She said that Mexico and Canada will merge with us and that a new, open source dollar called the Amero is going to replace the dollar. But the most scary thing is what she told me she’s been doing for the past couple of years. She’s been overseeing the construction of Learning Object Repositories being built all throughout America."
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"Combining these techniques can net us some very sophisticated data manipulations. Below is a form that will update a Creator, his address, updates three existing widgets adds one widget, and deletes two widgets."
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"The Depressive Pessimist will complain that the task that they're doing isn't enjoyable, and make statements doubting the group's ability to succeed.
The Jerk will say that other people's ideas are not adequate, but will offer no alternatives himself. He'll say "you guys need to listen to the expert: me."
The Slacker will say "whatever", and "I really don't care."
February 21, 2009 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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generalizable for many domains, not just software development: "However, as a program evolves, there’s a good chance that the Design In Code will not include all the good things we now understand. We have a better Design In Head. When the design in our head is enough better than the one in the code, it can pay off to bring the code closer to what we now understand."
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"Come on people, don't believe that you can create a world where the bits in the system are a perfect mirror of who you are. Individual identities are not something that can be reduced to microformats. I can change my mind, and not have to go back and update a zillion web pages to reflect that change of mind. Whatever you are calling "identity" here is emphatically not what human beings think of as their identity; perhaps if you replaced it with "dossier" the nature of the data gathering would be more clear in a historical context (think Stasi, for instance, instead of Facebook)."
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"So that's my guess about why Hulu blocked Boxee: those ads you see on Heroes are higher margin when you see them on your TV than when you see them on Hulu, and the only reason they're on Hulu is to make money from Heroes when you watch it online, so Apple or Google doesn't make that money instead. They were meant for your "portable computing devices" and not your precious TV. Now go back to the couch until we call for you again."
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"Well. As Dave Gray points out, “An unbook’s community is a very real part of the unbook’s development team.” I wouldn’t necessarily have used the phrase “development team,” for the obvious reasons, but the point stands. Your voice is a part of this book we’re writing, and not the least significant. What do you think?"
February 18, 2009 at 2:01 am · Filed under 105
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"The point of these two examples is to say that, at this moment in time (subject to change with a portfolio-crushing lack of notice) short-term mean-reversion is the stock market play du jour. Not respecting this shift in the markets and following the CNBC’esque view of the world (the market rallied today, the bottom is here!) is quite possibly the easiest way to underperform even the sad saps on Wall Street."
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"As it happens, the fledgling United States was completely ripped off by the manufacturer of the first official penny. At the time, the United States didn’t yet have a national Mint, so they outsourced currency production to James Jarvis of Connecticut, who had bribed the head of the Treasury board with $10,000 for the contract. Jarvis was supposed to produce 300 tons of pennies, but ultimately only produced four tons of slightly underweight coins. Furthermore, a congressional report stated that “Jarvis had received a large quantity of federal copper but had only paid for a small portion.” (Louis Jordan, University of Notre Dame)"
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"Paperclip is a plugin for Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord that lets files work as simply as any other attributes do. There are no extra database tables, only one library to install for image processing, and the ease of being able to refer to your files as easily as you refer to your other attributes."
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"In fact, their dismissal of history is a direct consequence of their version of Darwinism, which is focused on demonstrating how the actions of literary characters provide illustrative examples of human biological nature. While they give no end of homage to the idea that actual human behavior is subject to environmental influence – as far as I can tell, no one seriously doubts this – they seem to have no interest in investigating how behaviors and environments amplify into history. Literary Darwinism is paradoxically static, the examination of flies caught in amber, and Darwin himself has become a Platonic fetish to ward off the evils of change, of history."
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"So if my guess is true, we either start to see less globalization, or we will gradually start seeing borders coming down over the coming decades. The twenty first century could well go down in history as the era of decline of the nation-state."
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