"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."