“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.”