"Here’s the summary. The market for seed capital is clearly broken. Most individual angels will only do about 1 deal per year, which means their portfolios lose money 40% of the time due to insufficient diversification. Even premier angel groups like the Band of Angels say they only do about 8 deals per year. Our math says you need to do 125 to achieve good diversification. On the other side of the table, only 14% of entrepreneurs who want angel funding will find it. Those that do will spend about 6 months looking for money instead of building their businesses."

"Advertisers face a barrier because in social media, human bonds do not require third-party sponsorships. There is no external content to sponsor. Data collectors, who now hope to turn Facebook's social streams into the Experian of the future, also may hit a wall when human connections can no longer be intercepted."

"There’s only one rule at hack day: build something you can demonstrate at the end of the event (Powerpoint slides don’t count). Importantly though, our hack days are not restricted to just our development team: anyone from the technology department can get involved, and we extend the invitation to other parts of the organisation as well. At the Guardian, this includes journalists.

For our first hack day, I put together a list of “tools for non-developers”—sites, services and software that could be used for hacking without programming knowledge as a pre-requisite. I’m now updating that list with recommendations from elsewhere. Here’s the list so far:"

"The Empirical Game Analysis Toolkit (EGAT) is a project designed around compiling various game-theoretic tools into one comprehensive suite."

"The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) – suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. "

"As the speed of technological progress continues to accelerate, innovation threatens to outpace architects’ and designers’ working knowledge of materials thereby limiting their applicability. In order to stay at the cutting edge of design, a knowledge of the uses, properties, and sources of new materials is essential. A companion to the Transmaterial books written by Blaine Brownell and published by Princeton Architectural Press, Transmaterial online is intended to be a clear, concise, accessible, and carefully edited resource that provides information about the latest and most intriguing materials commercially available."

"Judging by the quality of much of the popular press, most of what gets published these days doesn't get edited in any meaningful way. Some of that is probably the fruit of cost cuts over the years, but I worry that some of it is a loss of the sense that it's supposed to happen at all."

"Richard Florida's exotic city, his creative city, depends on ghost people, working behind the scenes. Immigrants, people of colour. You want to know what his version of creative is? He's the relocation agent for the global bourgeoisie. And the rest of us don't matter."

"Although many use the terms "news" and "journalism" interchangeably, I think that journalism also encompasses something much more important — context. News certainly has its place. But I aim to use this site to advance the discussion of how we can better use the Web to deliver context in journalism."

This needs to happen to Universities: "…yes, we lost a lot of people. The people that just wanted to tell other people what to do were gone. They either left or were removed. The people who liked sitting in cubes and being told what to do left also."

"Chinese police are investigating the case, including whether or not Sun was brutalized. But the Chinese media and bloggers have surged to the case as a sign of workplace pressure gone awry. They have posted what they say is a Foxconn confidentiality and non-compete agreement, which promises fines for workers who break it. More fundamentally, they have enshrined the story of Sun Danyong as a bitter symbol of China’s industrial age."

"Our conference systems forces researchers to focus too heavily on quick, technical
and safe papers instead of considering broader and newer ideas. Meanwhile we
have focused much of our time and money on conferences where we can present
our research that we can rarely attend conferences and workshops to work and
socialize with our colleagues."

"President Obama’s top antitrust official and some senior Democratic lawmakers are preparing to rein in a host of major industries, including airline and railroad giants, moving so aggressively that they are finding some resistance from officials within the administration."

"It turns out that many of the great waves of creative destruction that have reinvented Silicon Valley didn't start there. More important, they didn't even start with the profit motive.

Rather, they started with interesting problems and people who wanted to solve them, exercising technology to its fullest because exploring new ideas was fun."

"I am 6.5 times as likely to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories in my RSS reader as I am to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories printed by the New York Times and the Washington Post."

"The press has become journalism’s curse, not only because it now brings a crushing cost burden but also because it led to all these myths: that we journalists own the news, that we’re necessary to it, that we decide what’s reported and what’s important, that we can package the world for you every day in a box with a bow on it, that what we do is perfect (with rare, we think, exceptions), that the world should come to us to be informed, that we deserve to be paid for this service, that the world needs us."

“Venture capital is where job creation will be, and venture capital is way behind private equity in developing critical mass in the state,” he said. “If you're really interested in building the Michigan economy, you do what is being done in Ohio and Oklahoma and other states: You spend Michigan money in Michigan.

"This website provides data on businesses with and without employees. These are referred to as “employer firms” and “nonemployer firms.” Employer firms have the lion’s share of receipts and payroll, while nonemployer firms are far more numerous."

Nonemployer business demographics, by sector and industry

Trends in non-employer and small business firms, establishments and companies from 1997-2006, United States. Note the rates at which nonemployer and <20 employee firms are growing, compared to larger firms over the same period.

"The estimated 27.2 million small businesses in the United States:

Employ about half of the country’s private sector workforce

Hire 40 percent of high tech workers, such as scientists, engineers and computer workers

Include 52 percent home-based businesses and two percent franchises

Represent 97.3 percent of all the exporters of goods

Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms

Generate a majority of the innovations that come from United States companies"

"The site-based production offers artists and audiences alike the opportunity to experience large-scale installations and experimental performances that transcend the usual and explore the unknown–this is not a gallery, club, concert hall, or street fair. The young FFIH curators aim to expose and expand their own community of unseen talent by producing a series that is free from expectation, free from censorship, free from tradition, and free of charge. Forth From Its Hinges seeks to represent local art, not as it exists today, but as what it can and will be in the future."

"The slower traders began issuing buy orders. But rather than being shown to all potential sellers at the same time, some of those orders were most likely routed to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds — 0.03 seconds — in what are known as flash orders. While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee."

"The emphasis shifts from contracts and legal sanctions to trust and transparency as companies work together, aligned with their customers' interests—sharing core values, business practices, infrastructure, and systems. Amazon's marketplace and eBay's webs of buyers and sellers are early prototypes of these federated networks. Apple and Facebook are struggling to understand the rules of engagement that should govern relationships with their applications developers. You can see them climbing a new learning curve through trial and error as they figure out how to build and sustain economies of trust."

"One person who hands out a lot of leaflets these days is Lynne Price, a local activist known affectionately as “Gobby Lynne”. Yet she gets much of her information about planning proposals, crime and so on from the internet. This illustrates one effect of the digitisation of information. As newspapers weaken and die, most people probably become less informed about local affairs, but a few motivated folk grow extremely knowledgeable. Ms Price will miss the Bedworth Echo, but not as a source of news. It was, she says, a useful way of getting the word out."

"We document widespread changes to the historical I/B/E/S analyst stock recommendations database. Across seven I/B/E/S downloads, obtained between 2000 and 2007, we find that between 6,580 (1.6%) and 97,582 (21.7%) of matched observations are different from one download to the next. The changes include alterations of recommendations, additions and deletions of records, and removal of analyst names. These changes are nonrandom, clustering by analyst reputation, broker size and status, and recommendation boldness, and affect trading signal classifications and back-tests of three stylized facts: profitability of trading signals, profitability of consensus recommendation changes, and persistence in individual analyst stock-picking ability."

Maybe Ann Arbor will re-expose the buried Allen Creek

"By taking a relaxing and regenerative break at least every 90 minutes, you increase your capacity to do more work. Just like your muscles need to relax after they tense up, you need to relax after short bursts of focused work. Obviously you don’t want to only take breaks. There needs to be a balance and a blend of relaxation and focused effort. But it’s amazing how many people forget the relaxation aspect."

"We are looking at a concentration of political power in the US banking system that we haven’t seen since the 1830s: Shades of Andrew Jackson vs. the Second Bank of the United States. We put up with a lot from our banking elite in this country, but historically we draw the line at financial power so concentrated it can confront the power of the President."

"What makes this a really handy app is that all documents created are copies of the original document you drag in the Document Palette app list. This allows you to essentially create a starting template for any type of document."

"The only difficulty with this entire story was that it was not remotely true. There had been no sustained assault by the Chinese on the legations, no breakthrough, no last stand, and no slaughter. In fact, July 6th had been quiet enough that Private R.G. Cooper, one of the British soldiers holed up in the legations, had not mentioned it in his diary of the siege. The most pressing news of those few days was the discovery of a buried British cannon from 1860, which the defenders of the legations refurbished and put to use."

"Rifgraf is a fire-and-forget web service for displaying graphs of data collected over time. Post your data points periodically via rest calls. Then view a graph of the data at any time in the future."

"My reaction to them… What the fuck is wrong with you people? Why would you think that I would want to have anything to do with you? How do you have the chutzpah to act as if we're old friends? How dare you? I see the RSVP list that one of you sent me, and I literally feel nauseous just remembering your names."

"This is a nice example of a tic unique to legislators and particularly common with Ben Nelson: the constituent voice. Some politicians talk in the first person ("I oppose raising taxes on the rich"). Some talk in the third-person ("Bob Dole opposes raising taxes on the rich"). And then some talk in the constituent person ("Voters oppose raising taxes on the rich"). The problem with the constituent person, however, is that it's falsifiable. And in this case, it's false."

"This paper seeks to explode the myth that Turing Machines (TM) are the universal model for all computation."

Now would somebody please undermine the computational complexity greed people have about algorithms? I find it deeply embarrassing to be told by somebody who "knows too much" that they will never even try an algorithm that is worse than polynomial, under any circumstances or for any problem. Like the idiots who have been taught some Gaussian statistics and say they would never gamble in a Casino because they KNOW they would ALWAYS lose.