"This specification defines an API that allows Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel to their main page. This allows for thread-like operation with message-passing as the coordination mechanism."

"In a CouchDB-enabled web, data-flows don't have to be centralized, which means friends can communicate without going through a fixed domain. This makes the web more efficient. It also means I can make data available to my social network without relying on 3rd-party services."

"The distinction matters, Harkinson argues, because the larger figure makes it appear that support for the Chamber’s positions—many of which Mother Jones opposes—is more broad-based than it really is. “The Chamber claims to speak for the U.S. business community,” he says, and the widespread use of the three million figure “certainly adds to” the impression that it does. But if many of those three million aren’t sustaining the Chamber financially or playing a role in setting its policies, how meaningful is the number? On Wednesday, Harkinson published an open letter to several reporters who had recently used the “three million” figure (sometimes with caveats or qualifiers), asking them to publish a correction."

"The reason the internet is such a home to wow business models is that it's easier to create a network here than any other time in history."

"On the outside it might appear that everybody who is not using Tool X is a moron. But speed & latency are only part of the picture. We already established that going from 5ms to 50ms might not even be noticeable by anyone using your product. The expense for speed can be multiple things:…"

"It's been too long since I've sat down to benchmark CouchDB. I'm working on the High Performance CouchDB chapter in the book, so I needed some numbers."

"Below is the same text rendered in HTML using the Fell Types revival fonts by Igino Marini with OpenType features enabled. Note the ‘ct’ ligature and the contextual form of the ‘s’:…"

"DFA is an innovative 501(c)(3) organization with a unique business model combining elements of a non-profit organization with those of a biotech company."

"Underneath the usual total unemployment numbers are the reasons an individual is unemployed: You are on temporary layoff; you quit your job; you have reentered the labor market and have yet to find a job; or you are entering the job market for the first time and have yet to find a job. Or, finally, you have been permanently separated from your previous employer, who has no expectation of hiring you back.

The last category is the dominant reason for unemployment at this time. That might not seem surprising, but it actually is. Never, in the six recessions preceding the latest one, did permanent separations account for more than 45 percent of the unemployed. The current percentage stands at 56 percent as of September and appears to be still climbing:…"

"The 2010 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering & Technology (fPET-2010) has issued its second call for papers (pdf here). fPET-2010 will be held 9-10 May 2010 (Sunday evening – Monday) at the Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Co. Organized by the Committee on Philosophy, Engineering & Technology, the event is held in cooperation with a number of organizations:…"

"Let’s make the other deliverable explicit: the team, and it’s growing capability.

I’m increasingly interested in the effect that social objects have on the way we work. There’s a growing body of research that demonstrates the ways in which our environment affects our behaviour[1]. The scrum picture has become a social object around which groups form – you see it in books, presentations, printed and stuck on walls, even (here at the Munich Scrum Gathering) on tattoos (the stick-on variety, though I wonder if any of the diehards has gone as far as making it permanent…). I worry about what happens when we surround ourselves with process pictures which (1) don’t include people, and (2) only tell half the story. As soon as we regard ourselves as “means” to some other group’s “ends”, or even worse to some process’s, we are disempowering ourselves (thanks to Ari Tikka in his Scan-Agile 2009 presentation for pointing this out)."

"This mystical belief in the magic of citation statis- tics can be found throughout the documentation for research assessment exercises, both national and in- stitutional. It can also be found in the work of those promoting the h-index and its variants."

"Now, as Jonathan Kohl would point out, many people marching behind the Agile banner do the same: they use Agile as another club with which to beat people. I’m less worried about Agile, though, because its base rhetoric is more explicitly humanist. Lean is more likely to be an attractive nuisance because the idea of driving out waste appeals to executives who find it less work to remove waste than to convert it into value—executives who get license to act sociopathic because they have a fiduciary duty to treat business as a machine for maximizing shareholder value, externalities be damned. I worry about Lean in a business culture where we are trained out of empathy for Lear, damned fool though he surely is."

Abstracts of the Workshop Philosophy & Engineering (2007)

Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering, 2008

"PMML uses XML to represent mining models. The structure of the models is described by an XML Schema. One or more mining models can be contained in a PMML document. A PMML document is an XML document with a root element of type PMML. The general structure of a PMML document is:…"

"The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) is a member driven organization that:

Supports the development of standards for cloud computing and frameworks for interoperating between clouds;
develops benchmarks for cloud computing;
supports reference implementations for cloud computing, preferably open source reference implementations;
manages a testbed for cloud computing called the Open Cloud Testbed;
sponsors workshops and other events related to cloud computing."

"The dashed circles above represent "forbidden regions" in which one of the angles would be obtuse. As Lindgren and Cassidy and Lord showed, eight triangles is best possible, and there exist alternate solutions with any even number of triangles larger than eight.

Recently, John Tromp added a new twist to the problem by asking on sci.math how to make the angles as acute as possible. For the eight-triangle solution, he found a placement of the vertices in which the maximum angle is only about 85 degrees, and asked if more triangles would achieve even better angles."

"WITH A FIVE PERCENT P MOTHERFUCKER"

"Calor licitantis: Bidder's heat, also known as auction fever. The term was coined in ancient Rome to define the sometimes-irrational behavior of bidders at auctions."

"Solving the current problems in science communication requires the intervention of strong companies such as Google. But it will take more than technical advances to provoke scientists into taking full advantage of the web. We need pressure, and perhaps compulsion, from journals and funders to raise publishing standards to the new level made possible by such tools. Google Wave may not be, indeed is probably not, the whole answer. But it points the way to tools that build records and reproducibility into every step. And that has to be good for science."

"PUT THAT PENCIL DOWN
Using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it's digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting."

"[Update: I should have added that perhaps the Chamber fully understands the difference between free markets and competitive markets, and simply wants to preserve the "freedom" to take advantage of customers.]"

"A look at another job market number, Macroblog: …At the end of August there were estimated to be fewer than 2.4 million job openings, equal to only 1.8 percent of the total filled and unfilled positions—a new record low. This is an especially significant issue given the large number of people who are looking for work. The ratio of the number of unemployed to the number of job openings was greater than 6 in August. In contrast, that ratio was under 1.5 in 2007 and previously peaked at 2.8 in mid-2003, suggesting that finding a job right now is extremely difficult…"

"The oldest thing Tony Garchinski, his mother, Yvonne or anyone else on the planet has ever touched fell with such force it cracked the windshield on the family's Nissan SUV, skidded across the hood and dented their garage door before landing on the ground, breaking into five fragments."

"So as my new years recommendation I would be happy if you can check out the website given above and join the idea of a clean code awareness."

"Deviating from society's average level of trust is costly only of the average level of trust is correct. Prior to the financial crisis, the level of trust was too high and more distrust than average would have been helpful in avoiding losses. Also, because the level of trust was too high, restoring trust to the blind faith level it was at before the crisis would be unwise. There wasn't enough fear and mistrust in financial markets as the bubble was inflating, and more skepticism and doubt than is appropriate. We need to rebuild trust, but even with an optimal regulatory response, we shouldn't go back to the same level of trust in complex financial products, ratings agencies, etc. that we had before."

"For a while i was interested to see how many of the rails developers i know, use macs. After talking about this urge of mine with the awesome @hakunin we have decided to collect a bunch of our colleagues desktop portraits. almost everyone is on a mac (duh!).

Foolishly, i forgot to notate some of the pictures people sent me with the name of the developer, so if you recognize yours and want to link the image/title to somewhere, lemme know."

"Bite-size Edits is an experiment in distributed and networked proofreading. We like to think of it as entertaining productive procrastination, all in the service of publishing books with no mistakes in them.

First, writers upload or post their text to Bite-size Edits. Then, the text snippets are served up to editors at random to proofread. Proofreaders fix any mistakes they find in the text, and can keep on checking following random chunks of text for as long as they like."

What I'll be doing in November

"The Agile Skills Project is a non-commercial resource that will establish a common baseline of the skills an Agile developer needs to have, including a shared vocabulary and understanding of fundamental practices. The Project intends to:

establish an evolving picture of the skills needed on Agile projects;
encourage life-long continuous learning;
establish a network of trust to help members find like-minded folk, and to identify new mentors in the community."

"ACTA has argued–quite convincingly and interestingly–that our accreditation system is badly broken, and has laid out a plan for repairing it. Among the recommendations: break the link between accreditation and federal financial aid. See ACTA's 2007 report, Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About it."

"Think about that for a second. Depth of field principles dictate that everything in the same focal plane will be in the same focus. This lens bends this rule literally by bending the light entering your camera, creating extreme spherical and chromatic distortions that you can control. What’s really cool is, similar to pinhole cameras and those of yesteryear, these lenses are completely analog. There is no communication going on between the lens and your camera. No focusing, no aperture control, no VER or any of that fancy stuff. In fact, the aperture can only be set by dropping a magnetic disk in front of the lens with holes cut out in various sizes. How cool is that?"

"I proposed that a network of carts and tiny kiosks be set up to give away Streetfood to anyone who asks."

"We’re happy to announce the release of the Arduino Mega, a larger, more powerful Arduino board. It’s based on the on the ATmega1280 (datasheet), which has 128 KB of Flash (program) memory, 8 KB of RAM, and 4 KB of EEPROM. The board has 54 digital pins (of which 14 provide PWM output), 16 analog inputs, 4 hardware serial ports, I2C, and all other goodness you expect from an Arduino board. The Mega is compatible with most shields designed for the Duemilanove, and includes the same automatic power selection, auto-reset on upload, and pre-burned bootloader."

"This document is a collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands and tasks which are useful for IT work or for advanced users. This is a practical guide with concise explanations, however the reader is supposed to know what s/he is doing.

Unix Toolbox revision 14.1
The latest version of this document can be found at http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml. Replace .xhtml on the link with .pdf for the PDF version and with .book.pdf for the booklet version. On a duplex printer the booklet will create a small book ready to bind. This XHTML page can be converted into a nice PDF document with a CSS3 compliant application (see the script example). See also the about page."

"Decisions: The first type of decisions is simple, “binary”, i.e. you just care if something is true or false. Very true or very false does not matter. Someone is either pregnant or not pregnant. A statement is “true” or “false” with some confidence interval. (I call these M0 as, more technically, they depend on the zeroth moment, namely just on probability of events, and not their magnitude —you just care about “raw” probability). A biological experiment in the laboratory or a bet with a friend about the outcome of a soccer game belong to this category.

The second type of decisions is more complex. You do not just care of the frequency—but of the impact as well, or, even more complex, some function of the impact. So there is another layer of uncertainty of impact. (I call these M1+, as they depend on higher moments of the distribution). When you invest you do not care how many times you make or lose, you care about the expectation…"

Be sure to look at the background and silhouetted wires in this shot. See the comment, "That's one of the most amazing collections of overhead wires I've ever seen on Shorpy. I'll bet that it has a lot to do with the business on the ground floor of our featured building."

"We like the fact that humans are social. It's good for society. And what they're doing online is fundamentally a mix of social grooming and maintaining peripheral social awareness. They want to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn't viable. They want to share their state of mind and status so that others who care about them feel connected. It's a back-and-forth that makes sense if only we didn't look down at it from outter space."

"OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world that anyone can edit. You can get the raw data for roads around the world, set up a server, design a new map style, and have your own personal online interactive maps. In the past, this has been difficult owing to the large volume of data required and the hassles of system administration. Tile Drawer is designed to make this process easy with a custom-configured Amazon EC2 machine image (AMI) that gets you up and running with just two pieces of information: a custom stylesheet that you choose, and the geographical location of a part of the world you'd like rendered."