“Where we are now, and we already know that we are there, is in a much more per­me­able and fluid soci­ety and a much more per­me­able cul­tural envi­ron­ment where the dif­fer­ence between pro­duc­ers and con­sumers is much more blurred. Where this cat­e­gory of users has become absolutely cen­tral to every­thing we do. So when we talk about news­pa­pers, we have to think about the users who com­mu­ni­cate with a com­mer­cial orga­ni­za­tion like TPM, the users who basi­cally get together and make their own new party presses, like Dai­lyKos or Town­hall, like the users who make up YouTube, like the users who make up Wikipedia. Sud­denly you have rad­i­cally decen­tral­ized prac­ti­cal capac­ity to act. And what do peo­ple do? They act.”

“In the indus­trial model of stu­dent mass pro­duc­tion, the teacher is the broad­caster. A broad­cast is by def­i­n­i­tion the trans­mis­sion of infor­ma­tion from trans­mit­ter to receiver in a one-​​way, lin­ear fash­ion. The teacher is the trans­mit­ter and stu­dent is a recep­tor in the learn­ing process. The for­mula goes like this: “I’m a pro­fes­sor and I have knowl­edge. You’re a stu­dent, you’re an empty ves­sel and you don’t. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-​​term mem­ory and through prac­tice and rep­e­ti­tion build deeper cog­ni­tive struc­tures so you can recall it to me when I test you.”… The def­i­n­i­tion of a lec­ture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the stu­dent with­out going through the brains of either.”

“In a sense, man­age­ment the­ory is what hap­pens to philoso­phers when you pay them too much.”

“If there is no signed writ­ten agree­ment, then the work isn’t for hire, and you start out with all the rights. If there is a writ­ten agree­ment, it should be entered into before you cre­ate the work. Beware of after-​​the-​​fact attempts to take away your rights by call­ing the work “for hire,” for exam­ple by send­ing you a check whose endorse­ment line says that your sig­na­ture is your agree­ment that the work was for hire.”

“Why work-​​for-​​hire is hurt­ing the cre­ative industry”

“The China Labyrinth was con­ceived in the early eight­ies by Mar­tin Medema who was first to imag­ine 64 hexa­gons in a con­fig­u­ra­tion wherein each would dif­fer from all oth­ers in terms of the con­fig­u­ra­tion of neigh­bours around it. That was brilliant.”

“The pur­pose of this site is to try to pro­vide infor­ma­tion on the var­i­ous poly­forms: poly-​​ominoes, –iamonds, –hexes, –cubes etc. There is a great deal of infor­ma­tion already on the inter­net and these pages will try to pro­vide links to all (well hope­fully most!) rel­e­vant sites. Where no infor­ma­tion seems avail­able else­where as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble will be posted here.”

“The fol­low­ing pic­tures show n points in the plane so that the ratio r of max­i­mum dis­tance (shown in red) to min­i­mum dis­tance (shown in blue) is the small­est known.”

Don’t give a damn about the soft­ware. The bench­marks are interesting.

“So, the claims of copy­right infringe­ment were doubt­ful, but I was will­ing to con­sider the issue fur­ther. The claims that I was hurt­ing anyone’s liveli­hood were laugh­able. The claims that I was hurt­ing people’s feel­ings were kind of heart-​​string tug­ging, and I did con­sider tak­ing the blog down then, but I didn’t. But the death threats, I can live without.”

“The key insight is that a sin­gle strong heuris­tic will do worse than a col­lec­tive of indi­vid­u­ally weak but diverse heuris­tics. The prob­lems are too hard for any one heuris­tic to solve per­fectly, but the diverse heuris­tics can, so to speak, cover each oth­ers’ weak­nesses and help each other out when they get stuck; a sin­gle strong heuris­tic can’t. A col­lec­tion of diverse strong heuris­tics would be even bet­ter, but the strong heuris­tics for a prob­lem tend to be sim­i­lar to each other, so a group of them lacks diver­sity. In prob­lem solv­ing and pre­dic­tion, diver­sity is exactly as impor­tant as indi­vid­ual ability.”

“The a2 mini maker faire will be held at the Neu­tral Zone on August 29^th
For view­ers:
Doors open: 10am
Doors close: 5pm
After-​​party: TBD”

“While you can place some blame on high fre­quency traders for skew­ing the data, Busi­ness Insider points to week-​​to-​​week per­for­mance bench­mark­ing as one cul­prit. Our sell side expe­ri­ence leads us to agree, even monthly per­for­mance bench­mark­ing is ridicu­lous for mea­sur­ing fun­da­men­tal invest­ing given the vagaries of the mar­ket in the short term. The result is that a lot of fund man­agers have no choice but to engage in spec­u­la­tive trade-​​chasing cov­ered by heaps of fun­da­men­tal BS to main­tain their firm’s fun­da­men­tal, dis­ci­plined image.”

“The webizens, like me, will con­tinue to fol­low the wis­est voices, even if they are oper­at­ing out­side the brand of big city papers.

The news barons might think that they can restruc­ture copy­right and fair use laws to plug those nid­dling lit­tle holes in ‘the pipeline that sends money back to where the con­tent is cre­ated’, to stop us from quot­ing Paul Krugman’s op-​​ed piece, but it won’t hold up.

So Sokolove’s piece — enti­tled “What’s a Big City With­out a News­pa­per?” — is incon­gru­ous to me. Might as well be “What’s A Fish With­out A Bicy­cle?” or “What’s An Opera With­out A Volcano?”

I am a fan of local news, but that is not the sole focus of big city news­pa­pers. They print car reviews, movie reviews, and sto­ries about pirates in Soma­lia, none of which are local. They are a blur of things, and no one has ever tried to unblur them, really.”