“Open Every­thing is a global con­ver­sa­tion about the art, sci­ence and spirit of ‘open’. It gath­ers peo­ple using open­ness to cre­ate and improve soft­ware, edu­ca­tion, media, phil­an­thropy, archi­tec­ture, neigh­bour­hoods, work­places and the soci­ety we live in: every­thing. It’s about think­ing, doing and being open.”

“It’s promis­ing that both are increas­ing over the past 30-​​odd years, since that means more peo­ple are both­er­ing to be quan­ti­ta­tive. Still, less than 5% of arti­cles men­tion p-​​values or infor­ma­tion cri­te­ria — some of that is due to the pres­ence of arts and human­i­ties jour­nals, but there’s still a big slice of the hard and soft sci­ences that needs to be con­verted. Also encour­ag­ing is the steady decline in the dom­i­nance of p-​​values to the AIC: they’re still about 4.5 times as com­monly used in acad­e­mia at large, but that’s down from about 15.5 times as com­mon in the mid-​​1970s, a 71% decline. Grad­u­ate stu­dents and young pro­fes­sors — the writ­ing is on the wall. Aside from being intel­lec­tu­ally supe­rior, infor­ma­tion cri­te­ria will give you a com­pet­i­tive edge in the job mar­ket, at least in the near future. After that, they will be required.”

“If you’re build­ing an e-​​commerce web­site or adding a small store to an exist­ing web­site, you have plenty of options to choose from. With so many dif­fer­ent options and so much vari­ety from one to another, there is no right or wrong solu­tion, just dif­fer­ent choices that may work best for you in dif­fer­ent situations.”

“AMG is a mul­ti­level tech­nique for solv­ing large-​​scale lin­ear sys­tems with opti­mal or near-​​optimal effi­ciency. Unlike geo­met­ric multi­grid, AMG requires lit­tle or no geo­met­ric infor­ma­tion about the under­ly­ing prob­lem and devel­ops a sequence of coarser grids directly from the input matrix. This fea­ture is espe­cially impor­tant for prob­lems dis­cretized on unstruc­tured meshes and irreg­u­lar grids.”

“The self-​​employed and micro-​​business com­mu­ni­ties face an over­whelm­ing reg­u­la­tory bur­den in com­ply­ing with IRS reg­u­la­tions. Accord­ing to the Gen­eral Account­ing Office, a small busi­ness owner faces more than 200 IRS forms and sched­ules that could apply in a given year. Vague and com­plex rules and forms can mean the demise of their busi­ness. Accord­ing to a study by the Tax Foun­da­tion, in 2005 indi­vid­u­als, busi­nesses and non­prof­its spent an esti­mated 6 bil­lion hours com­ply­ing with the fed­eral income tax code, with an esti­mated com­pli­ance cost of over $265.1 bil­lion. Busi­nesses bear the major­ity of tax com­pli­ance costs, total­ing nearly $148 bil­lion or 56 per­cent of total com­pli­ance costs. ”

“Nowa­days there is a com­mon agree­ment about how our soci­ety needs to be able to change and adapt to the fast changes that hap­pens in the eco­nom­i­cal, social and envi­ron­men­tal dimen­sions. We are inter­ested not in sin­gle and few changes, but in the abil­ity to con­tin­u­ously intro­duce new ideas in our prod­ucts, processes and orga­ni­za­tions in order to main­tain our con­di­tions or improve them. We are inter­ested in the abil­ity to inno­vate our activ­i­ties in what they do and how they do it.”

“This paper describes mech­a­nisms for asyn­chro­nous col­lab­o­ra­tion in the con­text of infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion, recast­ing visu­al­iza­tions as not just ana­lytic tools, but social spaces. We con­tribute the design and imple­men­ta­tion of sense​.us, a web site sup­port­ing asyn­chro­nous col­lab­o­ra­tion across a vari­ety of visu­al­iza­tion types. The site sup­ports view shar­ing, dis­cus­sion, graph­i­cal anno­ta­tion, and social nav­i­ga­tion and includes novel inter­ac­tion ele­ments. We report the results of user stud­ies of the sys­tem, observ­ing emer­gent pat­terns of social data analy­sis, includ­ing cycles of obser­va­tion and hypoth­e­sis, and the com­ple­men­tary roles of social nav­i­ga­tion and data-​​driven exploration.”

“Through­out the trip, we met with a diverse group of sus­tain­abil­ity lumi­nar­ies, includ­ing global sys­tems sci­en­tist Will Stef­fen, Aus­tralian Min­is­ter for Envi­ron­ment, Her­itage and the Arts (and for­mer Mid­night Oil front­man) Peter Gar­rett, Abo­rig­i­nal activist Isabelle Coe and sus­tain­abil­ity guru Phillip Sut­ton. Though their areas of exper­tise var­ied, they expressed a com­mon inter­est in find­ing new ways for indi­vid­u­als to think and col­lab­o­rate for the sake of the ‘whole.’”

“Don’t fall for the false promise of this or any other ver­sion of an obser­va­tional study. These kinds of stud­ies do not prove causal­ity. Nor do they prove that a drug reg­i­men works. The patients in this study who reli­giously took their statins had bet­ter all-​​cause mor­tal­ity than those who didn’t. But, as we saw above, adher­ers always have bet­ter all-​​cause mor­tal­ity than non-​​adherers. In this case, was it that the adher­ers lived longer or was it that statins con­ferred some sort of ben­e­fit. We can’t tell. But we do know that in the real stud­ies, the ran­dom­ized con­trol tri­als, statins didn’t do squat, so my vote would be that what we’re see­ing here is an adherer effect and not a statin effect.”

“One of the most com­pelling ideas now begin­ning to be dis­cussed is the need to shift from a market-​​based soci­ety to a commons-​​based soci­ety. In Amer­ica today, the ideal of “The Mar­ket” has become an out-​​of-​​control engine reshap­ing nearly every aspect of life from edu­ca­tion to the envi­ron­ment to our pri­vate lives. The commons—all the things we all own together that are not for sale to the high­est bidder—has been lost in this process, impov­er­ish­ing us all to a larger or smaller degree. Many things fall within that def­i­n­i­tion of the com­mons– air, water, health of the land, the inter­net, pub­lic health, sci­en­tific knowl­edge, cul­tural tra­di­tions, even lan­guages. For the most part, com­mons do not have price tags. Imag­ine them for a moment as prop­er­ties in which each of us holds an equal share of stock.”

“This long essay, to be pub­lished in parts, tries to make sense of the libero-​​genic hope and poten­tial of com­puter and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy in a frame­work that also makes sense of the dan­gers. I return to a an essay from the ado­les­cence of lib­er­al­ism — Ben­jamin Constant’s 1816 “The lib­erty of ancients com­pared with that of mod­erns” — to argue that the lib­er­at­ing hyper-​​individualism of the web is also the source of its great­est dan­gers. It is now more urgent than ever for us to reclaim our abil­ity to decide all together on our com­mon futures: we need to exer­cise our col­lec­tive free­dom to pre­serve our mod­ern liberty.”

“You know, between the two of ‘em, I can decide which one of those guys I’d rather see in jail.”

“Even things that you might expect to come stan­dard — like an Inter­na­tional Stan­dard Book Num­ber (ISBN), with­out which a book won’t be offered for sale by many pro­fes­sional book­sellers — are often only avail­able at extra cost, so authors should always read the fine print to know what they’re get­ting into. While you’re shop­ping around, here’s a quick look at five good pos­si­bil­i­ties for POD publishing:”

“More than just a plu­gin, WPtouch is an entire theme pack­age for your Word­Press web­site. Mod­eled after Apple’s app store design specs, WPtouch makes your Word­Press web­site load light­ning fast on touch mobile devices, show your con­tent beau­ti­fully, all while not inter­fer­ing with your reg­u­lar theme.”

“I’ve just returned from a week long trip to Shen­zhen, China in a “geek tour” trip orga­nized by Bun­nie Huang, with some assis­tance from the fine folks at PCH International.”

I, I, I.

“I had two cru­cial ingre­di­ents: Math­e­mat­ica and NKS. With Math­e­mat­ica, I had a sym­bolic lan­guage to rep­re­sent anything—as well as the algo­rith­mic power to do any kind of com­pu­ta­tion. And with NKS, I had a par­a­digm for under­stand­ing how all sorts of com­plex­ity could arise from sim­ple rules.”

“The National Asso­ci­a­tion for the Self-​​Employed (NASE) strongly sup­ports pro­pos­als such as health care tax cred­its, a self-​​employment tax deduc­tion on health insur­ance pre­mi­ums, expan­sion of both Health Reim­burse­ment Arrange­ments (HRAs) and Health Sav­ings Accounts (HSAs), and pool­ing arrange­ments for small busi­ness as impor­tant steps to cre­at­ing an equi­table envi­ron­ment for micro-​​businesses and the self-​​employed to pur­chase afford­able, qual­ity health coverage. ”

“Even if the golden age of “inter­ac­tive fic­tion” has passed, and its feel­ies are now the glo­ri­ous pre­serve of only the most com­mit­ted boffins, I can’t shake the feel­ing that feel­ies have a future, too. It’s curi­ous that seek­ing antecedents to the future arti­facts meme takes us down an over­grown path into the not-​​too-​​distant past, there to find that feel­ies — tan­gi­ble aux­il­iaries to a cutting-​​edge sto­ry­telling tech­nol­ogy, con­ces­sions to meat­space — may have a tran­sre­al­ity stay­ing power that as a prac­tice, seems time­less, com­pared to the won­der­fully quaint elec­tronic games they were cre­ated merely to supplement.”

“Project Won­der­ful is an online adver­tis­ing bro­ker with an inno­v­a­tive model that brings fair­ness, trans­parency, and prof­itabil­ity to the adver­tis­ing process.”

“The Detroit News reports that Ypsi­lanti Town­ship is among three munic­i­pal­i­ties that have recently agreed to join the Detroit Region Aero­trop­o­lis Ini­tia­tive, at a cost of $25,000 a year. The public-​​private sec­tor part­ner­ship aims to develop roughly 60,000 acres from Detroit Metro Air­port to Wil­low Run Air­port. The arti­cle states that the city of Ypsi­lanti and Van Buren Town­ship agreed to join last year.”