"Finally, in the spirit of cooperation and sharing, and by agreement with our interviewees, we are making this footage available to others who want to make films on this subject, and who may not have the resources to travel to and meet these exceptional individuals. We hope the HDV Torrents we have provided are of sufficient quality. If you have any issues, please contact us.

Steal This Film is a work in progress, incomplete, open to contradiction and response. The task of talking back to our point of view is one we leave at the feet of you, the viewers, users and produsers of the film."

"I think you're logic is backwards. You make it public so that people can refractor the umich-specific parts if that's useful to them. Every OSS project starts out only meeting the specific needs of its creators. You make it public so it can become generally applicable, not make it generally applicable so it can become public."

"I am interested in simple but robust computer vision and information visualization techniques that support interactive analysis of human behavior in multi-stream video. My advisor is Dr. Gregory Abowd."

"ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want."

"This project aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used. All graphics submitted to the project should be placed into the Public Domain according to the statement by the Creative Commons. If you'd like to help out, please join the mailing list, and review the archives. "

"The goal of this project is to spread media content that is licensed under Creative Commons throughout the web in much the same way that weblogs spread CC licensed text."

"Teasley's current research focuses on the social and cognitive processes in collaboration. She researches technology use to support key aspects of collaboration for both co-located groups and distributed groups. She has extensive experience assessing work practices and user needs, and designing, implementing, and evaluating technology use. She has conducted her work in schools, Fortune 500 companies, and with the biomedical community where she has helped to support the scientific activity in several distributed research centers. She is also involved in the development and evaluation of collaborative tools for academic research and teaching in higher education. "

"I study the building of bridges, wikis in organizations, and interventions with newly hired employees in order to understand how distributed work gets done and how social computing technologies are engaged in that work. I'm especially interested in learning that takes place when people work together. I aim to contribute new ways of thinking about distributed work, learning in collaboration, and the roles of social computing in both. "

"Querious is a new MySQL database management application written from the ground up exclusively for Mac OS X Leopard. Unlike mindless Mac OS X versions of applications made for Windows or Linux, Querious is a stunning new app that is precise and easy to understand, giving you full control without getting in your way."

"Based on my experience I believe that the DRY rule does not apply to Business Natural Languages. A major reason for using a Business Natural Language is to separate the business logic from the complexities of the under-lying system. When using a Business Natural Language, business users who are the most familiar with the domain can maintain the business logic. To a business user, a Business Natural Language should be no different than a group of phrases that describe the rules for running the business correctly."

"While debating what makes for good journalism is worthwhile, and is clearly needed, it prevents the discussion from advancing to any analysis about the greater good that can be gained from audience participation in news. Furthermore, the debate often exacerbates the differences primarily in processes, overlooking obvious similarities. If we take a closer look at the basic tasks and values of traditional journalism, the differences become less striking."

Impressively addictive

"This curriculum is designed to give teachers a comprehensive set of tools to educate students about copyright while incorporating activities that exercise a variety of learning skills. Lesson topics include: the history of copyright law; the relationship between copyright and innovation; fair use and its relationship to remix culture; peer-to-peer file sharing; and the interests of the stakeholders that ultimately affect how copyright is interpreted by copyright owners, consumers, courts, lawmakers, and technology innovators."

Redmine plugins for making the platform more project-appropriate.

"If you were ever picked on as a kid, you may have an idea of what it feels like to be a person with Aspergers in a typical office. The difference is that the person with Aspergers might not look any different than anyone else. But just like that kid on the playground, a person with Aspergers is likely to be just as confused as to why they are being "picked on". Reaching out to a person with Aspergers/autism, or at the very least working in a harmonious way, can do wonders for their self-esteem and earn you a loyal friend in the process."

""One of the unique aspects of New York City is that you don't need to own a car, but City policy is telling thousands of New Yorkers otherwise," says Paul Steely White, Executive Director of Transportation Alternatives. "Unless these policies change, the resulting traffic will completely erase the City's positive efforts to reduce congestion." In addition to the study, the groups will release a letter calling on Mayor Bloomberg to substantially reduce the amount off-street parking being built and planned in the five boroughs. The letter from the groups recommends an environmentally sustainable parking policy which requires the City to:…"

"The RIAA doesn’t stop at manipulating copyright law to gouge artists and the public. They also use their lawsuits as leverage to argue for control over any technology that could be used to distribute music. For example, they have pushed to require all wireless access points to be encrypted and closed, to restrict technologies like BitTorrent and other forms of peer-to-peer distribution, to impose bandwidth caps on home internet users, and to monitor traffic through service providers. Such efforts directly hurt free software. Because free software authors around the world work by collaboration, they rely on open distribution networks to move software, data, and conversation around. In particular, peer-to-peer technologies make this easier and cheaper for people with less bandwidth, and so are a powerful means of boosting grassroots free software distribution and development efforts."

"We believe Agile software development is being dumbed down, commodified, and is losing its spirit. We seek to replace the current name with one having two virtues: first, that it capture more exactly the attitudes originally behind Agile; second, that it be obscure enough that no one will assume they already know what it means and that—amazingly enough!—they are already doing it."

"On another occasion, a morning radio host in Los Angeles invited me to be interviewed on his show about some city planning issue. When I called in, he asked two or three clueless questions about housing, and then blurted out that he had Penn on another microphone. Apparently, he thought he was a junior Geraldo Rivera doing an ambush interview, which, naturally, would segue into a debate about whether I had killed six people. I got an apology from the station manager for that."

Reminds me of deep problems at Distributed Proofreaders….

"A significant percentage of online content is now published and consumed via the mechanism of crowdsourcing. While any user can contribute to these forums, a disproportionately large percentage of the content is submitted by very active and devoted users, whose continuing participation is key to the sites' success. As we show, people's propensity to keep participating increases the more they contribute, suggesting motivating factors which increase over time. This paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop. We demonstrate that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites Digg.com and Youtube.com."

"RiP: A remix manifesto is a documentary film about copyright and remix culture. You can contribute to the film, and follow the conversation on the social networks below."

"In the meantime, we should take comfort from the fact that the Fundamental Attribution Error isn't always a bad thing. For instance, if I tell you that I really like what you're wearing today, it might just be a response to the situation: I could be thinking that this is a good way to put you at your ease, or to avoid an awkward silence. But if you tell me the same thing, I'll probably believe that you meant it and that you are a genuinely nice person. I can't help it; it's my nature."

"Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:

No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text
And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met."

"PSwarm is a global optimization solver for bound and linear constrained problems (for which the derivatives of the objective function are unavailable, inaccurate or expensive).

The algorithm combines pattern search and particle swarm. Basically, it applies a directional direct search in the poll step (coordinate search in the pure simple bounds case) and particle swarm in the search step."

"Unfortunately, the average investor does not understand the math involved to know what the rebalance is doing to their capital, and they don’t know that since these funds rebalance daily, they need to rebalance almost daily, as well.
The bottom line is that these are good tools and have lots of advantages, but investors really need to understand them before diving in head first."

"The fires of the amateur’s enthusiasm are worth stoking; and the heat that they give is not false. Yet they also ought to be more than flashes, and they must absolutely be more than the inverse reflections of the newspaper’s dying embers."

"Often patients will prefer to deal with acute and chronic issues but have me bill under a preventative code because their high-deductible HSA will pay for prevention, but not for acute and chronic problem maintenance. This puts providers in an uncomfortable position. Should you make it a slam dunk that you get paid and bill under a prevention code and scribble a little health maintenance in the chart? Or should you stick the bill to the patient, discount for cash, or just take what you can get?"

"Taking a broader view of the entire ETF and ETN market, though, there are still some tax situations investors need to be aware of. Of the roughly 850 ETFs and ETNs currently available, there are different tax implications in using ETF products that deal with derivatives, mostly leveraged, inverse and commodity-type ETFs. ETFs are “looked through” to their holdings and an investor would be taxed appropriately. Read our article on how these ETFs are taxed."

"Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected."

"Among the many inconvenient facts that Wilson leaves out is that present trends suggest that 40 to 50 percent of all persons with bachelor’s degrees in 2009 will eventually go on to graduate or professional school. Those debts can be enormous, and when one acknowledges the real chances that any individual with a B.A. will go on to grad school the “lifetime of debt” is indeed more “likely.”"

BE SURE to click through and load the images.

"Last week I read in the morning paper about a street here where 60 out of 66 homes were vacant or abandoned on a single block. The reporter called it a "ghost street." Yesterday I found myself in the area. Other than an errant sofa, the street was completely empty, almost peaceful. I took a photo of every house on the north side of one block and then stitched them together. If you were to compare the current international housing crisis to a black hole sucking the equity out of our homes, this one-way street near the northern border of Detroit might just be the singularity: the point where the density of the problem defies anyone's ability to comprehend it. These homes started emptying in 2006."

'The article states that the new law “does little to address affinity-card contracts, which encourage colleges and universities to sell students’ contact information to credit-card companies….Students at the University of Michigan, for example, probably aren’t aware that their e-mail addresses and contact information are worth a whopping $25.5 million. That’s how much Bank of America is paying the Michigan Alumni Assn. over an 11-year affinity-card contract to market school-branded plastic to students, alums, and sports fans.”'

"It's holiday weekend time, kids, and just because there's a nasty recession going on doesn't mean you have to skip the steaks. The Washington Post has put together this helpful printable PDF that will introduce you to some cheaper cuts of beef that can be quite tasty when given a little TLC."

"It took me a second to figure out what was going on when I first got a look at this table full of analog clocks. But once I stood back from my screen, I realized that none of the clocks have the correct time and the whole thing is a macro timepiece that tells the time using 24 individual clocks."

"“I’m mad at myself for being duped all these years by them and going along with all of the things they wanted me to do,” said Homer Cutrubus, a Chrysler dealer in Utah since 1969. “If I treated my customers like Chrysler treated me, I wouldn’t have any business.”

For years, Chrysler had been urging Mr. Cutrubus and other dealers to combine dealerships with just one or two of the company’s brands into “alpha” stores selling all three: Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep. It stepped up that pressure in February, he said, and in April he finally agreed to move his Dodge store in Layton, Utah, into a Chrysler-Jeep showroom half a mile away, even though he thought the change made little sense financially and had to be done at his own expense."

"The job of digital concierge grows in significance as more and more material is introduced to the market via the web. As mentioned above, the web community around an author almost becomes their studio where new material is introduced, discussed and ‘published’. The author will require a digital concierge who will marry and blend the appropriate technology tools so they are not a distraction to the content producer and they compliment the experience of the consumer. There is much to ponder here as trade book content moves to the web and the role of the publisher changes. While the job description for the digital concierge may not be written yet, I see this position as potentially critical to the successful migration from a trade print world to one dominated by social communities."

"In order for buildings, especially multi-family apartment buildings to be truly bright green they must be within the reach of average people. But how?

To investigate this question and other issues surrounding green building and design, "deep green" professionals met at the third annual Living Future unconference in Portland, Ore., last week. On the first day, attendees had the opportunity to visit three of Portland's best examples of affordable, green buildings: Central City Concern's Richard Harris Building, Reach Community Development's Station Place Tower and the Turtle Island Development LLC's Sitka Apartments."

"For the long term investor, cleantech is one of the best sector plays out there. And the best way to play a sector is with a low-cost ETF. This guide will review all 16 cleantech ETFs traded in the US, and offer investors the information they need to add a slice of long term growth to their portfolio. Not all cleantech ETFs are made alike, and we'll show you which funds are the best bets for future returns:"

"They love to make it sound like making articles available free online is what killed newspapers. After all, then the problem is freeloading readers, news aggregators, and blogs. But in the case of classifieds, newspapers are getting trounced by a product that’s pretty much better and more efficient in every way, which casts them in a much less sympathetic light. Which just underscores the point that the industry needs to redouble its efforts to find a new model, rather than preserving an old one that was bloated and inefficient in many ways."

"The third graph shows the bank failures by total assets and deposits per year in current dollars adjusted with CPI. This data is from the FDIC (1) and starts in 1934.

WaMu accounted for a vast majority of the assets and deposits of failed banks in 2008, and it is important to remember that WaMu was closed by the FDIC, and sold to JPMorgan Chase Bank, at no cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF)."

"The deadly Doctor Methuselah seeks to unravel time itself with his solution to the Eternity Equation… Gorilla Khan stalks darkest Africa from conquered Atlantis… Mad scientists, strange sorcerors, and power-hungry dictators all seek to undo the fate of humanity. It’s the final century of the second millennium – and you are our last hope!"

"I happen to believe that this blog tells a positive story. It is the story of a family unsatisfied with a typical yuppie trajectory in San Francisco who intentionally moved to the most maligned city in America. It is the story of a man who finds that city beautiful in ways that may be difficult to understand at first, though if you stay long enough he'll try to explain. It's the story of thousands of people around the world who for some reason return to this website despite having no connection to this failing Rust Belt, one-industry town wounded by racism and poverty but surviving with a compelling grace. This is, I believe, ultimately a story with hope: another family choosing to root itself where so many are warned never to go. A city full of beautiful people surviving among the ruins. Strangers who come here to read with care and concern in their hearts. A seed that germinates in words never before read."

"One would expect no less from the Ann Elk of complexity/automata theory."

'…paper read before the club by Calvin Thomas, entitled "The Devil"…'

"To create economic value, journalists and news organizations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information and sources, and their ability to provide immediacy in conveying information. The value of those elements has been stripped away by contemporary communication developments. Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.

Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay."

"RSRuby is a bridge between Ruby and the R interpreted language. When RSRuby is called in a Ruby script, a full R interpreter is embedded into the Ruby interpreter, allowing the Ruby script to call functions from any R library the user wishes."

"The art of conversation, with its counterpart the dialogue as a literary form for presenting ideas, has also declined since the days of Galileo, while the art of advertising has advanced. Advertising is easily recognized as the literary form that most completely responds to the technique of the printing press, because it demands, above all else, a numerous and receptive "public" of readers. A great number of improvements in the graphic arts have been adaptations to the needs of advertisers. Yet, in its development of "direct mail" methods and circular letters, advertising seems to be more emancipated than literature from the printing press. One of the most curious recent developments in the graphic arts is the effort of the advertisers to make printed matter look like typescript, while the authors of books that are not in sufficient demand to warrant publication are seeking a typescript that will look like print."

"The idea builds on an installation, called Bacterial Orchestra, the pair took in 2006 to Brazil, Germany, Norway and elsewhere. This year, the new generation, called Public Epidemic No.1 is spreading beyond the microphones and loudspeakers of the original installation.

Cornéer said the current project could be hosted on any mobile phone but they chose the iPhone “because it’s popular and the centralized App Store makes it easy for the epidemic to spread.”

Check out the clip from the first test of the project above and follow after the jump for more detail on how it works."

"Mishu Warner’s anatomy of a Naga, which are serp[e]nt dieties in Buddhist and Hindu Mythology. The main image is the female Naga, or Nagini, but Mishu included the alternate tail, just in case you wanted to know what a Naga’s testicles might look like."

"EPO's president, Alison Brimelow, has been quoted as saying: "Huge backlogs change the nature of the patenting system and create ambiguities which can be exploited in ways unforeseen by those who established the patent system."

In response, the European Union has funded a project called PATExpert which uses semantic web technology. PATExpert is a multimedia content representation system for the retrieval, classification and generation of concise parent information. The system supports multiple languages and provides tools to assess patent material. The system has been demonstrated and the probable next step is commercialization for general use."

"We saw this sort of "favored garbage" all the time in the 90s. As a consequence Regulation FD, for "fair disclosure", was passed. It mandates that you cannot issue information that is material to your stock price to only a few select people – you have to give it to everyone at the same time, and the most common way you do this is to request a halt on your stock from the NYSE, issue the press release, then have the NYSE lift the halt.

This way nobody can get either long or short in front of your announcement and nobody gets to profit unfairly (or get screwed unfairly) as a consequence of whatever it is you need to announce."

"TuneUp is a great piece of software that does exactly what it claims to, but at the cost of being somewhat time-intensive. I highly recommend TuneUp to anyone looking to clean up their library, but offer the warning that it isn’t as simple as dragging all your music in and walking away for a few hours. If it were, it would truly be the “magic pill” of music organization."

"Google is beginning to fail to scale: there are now so many things on the internet and my memory for unique key words is so foggy that I can no longer find things I know exist."

"We see increased diversity everywhere in the technium. Manufactured species of underwater organisms such as 70-foot submarine parallel living organisms like a blue whale. Airplanes ape birds, so to speak. Our houses are but better nests. But the technium explores niches that the born never ventured into. We know of no organisms using radio waves, yet the technium has produced hundreds of varieties of radio communicating species. While moles have been digging up earth for millions of years, two-story tunnel digging contraptions are so much larger, faster, and less daunted by solid rock than anything born that we can truly say they occupy a new niche on Earth."

"July 1940. Berrien County, Michigan. "Migrant fruit workers from Arkansas." 35mm nitrate negative by John Vachon for the FSA."

"In a previous post I laid out some guidelines for helping you create stitched panoramic photographs. To help further inspire experimentation of this technique, I scoured Flickr for some prime examples of what can be accomplished. Each image links back to the Flickr page and most contain large or even original size images if you want to take a closer look."

"Things to keep in mind.

No matter where you start, start with one simple test. One assertion, if you can manage it.
Write the code to make that test pass
Then refactor — this part is critical, this is where the creative design is with a TDD process.
Then write the next test.
In Rails, you'll often start in the controller then realize that code needs to be written in the model (or vice-versa). Write a separate test for the model — testing models from the controller makes it hard to test all the model logic.
It's okay to plan the tests in advance, but you should only work on one test at a time. (Sometimes I'll write the series of tests, then comment out all but one)"

"In my mind, people don’t earn lawsuits. They win them. When I decided to publicly speak out against the Hearst Corporation in no way shape or form did I ever consider winning an individual lawsuit as any kind of victory. I am interested in being part of a movement that brings respectability, dignity and accountability back to the newspaper journalism profession.
I believe that the battle to do so must begin in the newsroom and not the courtroom. It must be first fought with our minds and with our integrity. This is not as difficult as some might think. We all know that newspaper publishers and owners lost both their minds and their integrity long ago."

"I'm working a serious publication now and so I'm going to try to avoid words like "barbaric" to describe policy decisions I don't like. But this is certainly unnecessary. CEPR ends with the economic argument: "Each year millions of American workers go to work sick, lowering their own productivity and that of their coworkers and potentially spreading illness to their coworkers and customers." I'm willing to cut employers some slack: Many don't offer paid sick days because they don't think doing so will make them money."

"If Facebook were being used to talk anonymously to a bunch of strangers, as with the early AOL chatrooms, then the adoption of this technology wouldn't show such a strong geographical pattern — who cares if no one else in your state uses a chatroom, as long as there are enough people in total? This shows how firmly grounded in people's real lives their use of Facebook is; otherwise it would not spread in a more or less person-to-person fashion from its founding location."