"I started the Ypsi Project in January of this year. I started the project for various reasons – it was a way to force myself to get out, to meet people, get involved, etc…and it was going relatively well, I thought. I began to focus more on portraits than on objects or places. I was encouraged and excited about the willingness and enthusiasm of the people that I met.

Then I started a new job and lots of personal things began to take up a significant amount of my attention and energy, blah, blah, excuses, excuses."

"I have signed up for multiple GA accounts and never took the time to read the TOS until now. Like any legal document, it’s dry and at times full of legalese and formality. Here’s what you need to know…in plain English (emphasis and italicized comments are mine):"

"As he works from episode to episode it becomes apparent that Joss starts to remember who he is, but knowing he shouldn't draw attention to this fact he keeps it to himself and works slowly to improve Dollhouse from within. From episode 6 `Man on the Street' flashes of brilliance begin to save the show, culminating in the superb episode 9 `A Spy in the House of Love', by now Dollhouse has become gripping, funny, dark and touching with an intelligent and complex storyline that has people thinking. Joss is even able to help other people taken over by Fox and makes Eliza Dushku realise that she is an actress."

""Никто не осмелится назвать это тайным заговором" immediately became a hit on the Russian blogosphere. Both repressive governments and greedy, cowardly businesses are finding it ever harder to suppress information"

via: innumerable sources

"…"

"First, note the non-negative aspects of the study. Stereotypes take another hit as gamers have an average age of 35, and are implicitly equally divided by gender. (Yes, I still get academics telling me gamers are only teen males) Will these get media attention?

Second, the technological determinism. Gaming drives depression and bad BMI, it seems, less than games being chosen as art or entertainment by those with such conditions. One wonders if the social ostracism attached to depression and obesity points one towards a cultural artifact with a bad cultural reputation."

"We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems."

"As the review said, one of the things McMahon points out in the book is, there is a regrettable tendency in numerical approaches to linguistics to just put the raw data into the Analysatrons, and see what happens. And she said, in a more measured and thoughtful way than I just did, that this is nonsense: a linguist still needs to make sense of the input, identify what correlations are worth pursuing, and filter out what methodologically needs filtering out.

I mean, word lengths and word frequencies? Even Plato had a more sophisticated understanding of language structure than that; and that's not saying much."

"If the technology catches on, camera performance will be no longer be limited by the software that comes pre-installed by the manufacturer. Virtually all the features of the Stanford camera – focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. – are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere. “The premise of the project is to build a camera that is open source,” said computer science professor Marc Levoy."

"You know that excellent explanatory piece you produced four weeks ago as a sidebar to a big news story on your topic? Rescue it from the archives and put it in a nice, prominent place online. Link to it with a clear, compelling headline.

Pull together a page online with links to several such explanatory pieces (from your site and elsewhere), along with good, useful digests of all of them. Make it so that users don’t have to visit every link to get a picture of the story, but have places to go when they want to know more. Set a recurring reminder to check in on this page once a week. Create a shortened URL for this page and repeat it every time you cover this topic."

"One would be hard-pressed to disapprove of autodidacticism. Consider a list of notable alumni from the academy of the self-taught: René Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, William Blake. Michael Faraday apprenticed himself to a bookseller and read everything he could before going on to figure out electromagnetism. August Wilson schooled himself at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh after dropping out of the ninth grade. Arnold Schoenberg claimed to be an autodidact, and who are we to dispute it? Frank Zappa advised, “Forget about the senior prom and go to the library and educate yourself, if you’ve got any guts.” Hear, hear. (Though if the prom band is playing Frank Zappa songs, we’re donning a powder-blue brocade tux and we’re going.)"

OLDSTYLE & SMALL CAPS FTW

"StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge."

"Just remember: they will continue to say what we are doing here, online, is illegitimate, immoral, and irrelevant."

"But there was something else going on: a general belief that bubbles just don’t happen. What’s striking, when you reread Greenspan’s assurances, is that they weren’t based on evidence — they were based on the a priori assertion that there simply can’t be a bubble in housing. And the finance theorists were even more adamant on this point. In a 2007 interview, Eugene Fama, the father of the efficient-market hypothesis, declared that “the word ‘bubble’ drives me nuts,” and went on to explain why we can trust the housing market: “Housing markets are less liquid, but people are very careful when they buy houses. It’s typically the biggest investment they’re going to make, so they look around very carefully and they compare prices. The bidding process is very detailed.”"