links for 2009-11-29
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awesome
Archive for November, 2009
links for 2009-11-27
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"Brilliant … but what made Dr. K’s technique most insidiously evil and genius was, during the most technically difficult lecture of the entire quarter, there was no lie. At the end of the lecture in which he was not called on any lie, he offered the same challenge to work through the notes; on the following Monday, he fielded our theories for what the falsehood might be (and shooting them down “no, in fact that is true – look at “) for almost ten minutes before he finally revealed: “Do you remember the first lecture – how I said that ‘every lecture has a lie?’”"
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"Keeping tabs on the thematic redundancy with which the United States government has marketed its calls for regime change over the years would appear to be a responsible activity for American citizens, given the fact that our nation has its imperial tentacles wrapped all over the planet. But I have never seen a "Remember Panama" sign at a protest, and, as I have confessed, until a few weeks ago, I would not have known what such a sign meant. Whenever Panama is discussed in the media, it is in order to advise Americans to go there and spoil their unspoiled beaches (hence, my initial interest in the country)."
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""g" is a new library that provides a global "g" method that you can use to inspect objects much in the same way as Kernel#p. The difference is that the output goes to Growl, a popular OS X global notifications tool. It's technically an easy gem install and go, but if you have problems with it not finding Growl, this blog post about getting ruby-growl working should salve your distress."
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"Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?
There’s this myth in wide circulation: rational, emotionless Vulcans in white coats, plumbing the secrets of the universe, their Scientific Methods unsullied by bias or emotionalism. Most people know it’s a myth, of course; they subscribe to a more nuanced view in which scientists are as petty and vain and human as anyone (and as egotistical as any therapist or financier), people who use scientific methodology to tamp down their human imperfections and manage some approximation of objectivity."
links for 2009-11-22
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"ggplot2 is a plotting system for R, based on the grammar of graphics, which tries to take the good parts of base and lattice graphics and none of the bad parts. It takes care of many of the fiddly details that make plotting a hassle (like drawing legends) as well as providing a powerful model of graphics that makes it easy to produce complex multi-layered graphics."
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"Because the first priority of the Fed is the health of the banking system itself, and not the national economy and the availability of credit to non-banking institutions. They are seeking to drive commercial entities out of secure savings to risk investment again, but providing a safe harbor for the banks while they are doing it, while attempting to maintain the appearance of financial system solvency. "
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"SuperCollider is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server.
SuperCollider was written by James McCartney over a period of many years, and is now an open source (GPL) project maintained and developed by various people. It is used by musicians, scientists, and artists working with sound. For some background, see SuperCollider described by Wikipedia."
links for 2009-11-20
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"Most machine learning researchers perform quantitative experiments to estimate generalization error and compare the performance of different algorithms (in particular, their proposed algorithm). In order to be able to draw statistically convincing conclusions, it is important to estimate the uncertainty of such estimates. This paper studies the very commonly used K-fold cross-validation estimator of generalization performance. The main theorem shows that there exists no universal (valid under all distributions) unbiased estimator of the variance of K-fold cross-validation."
links for 2009-11-19
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"A framework to allow Ruby applications to generate file/folder stubs (like the rails command does for Ruby on Rails, and the ‘script/generate’ command within a Rails application during development)."
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"It’s only natural that you’re asking how the hell we wound up in this mess. Why did a bubble inflate in commercial real estate? Why are smaller banks so disproportionately exposed? What caused this catastrophe?
Fortunately, we figured it out for you."
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I would like to suggest a Workantile Exchange Faceball league.
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"It’s Thanksgiving, and we’re very thankful for the continuing kind words and terrific support you all have shown us this year.
We know it’s been a tough year for a lot of folks out there. So we’d like to help. Before the madness of retail’s Black Friday hits, with all kind of crazy “get up at 4am to get in line” sales, we have a much simpler alternative for you.
40% off all our titles. Now through Wed Nov 25. Just use the coupon code PRAGTHANKS40 when checking out. Please note that orders placed on or after Tuesday may not get shipped until Monday, November 30, as our shipping facilities will be closed for the holiday. So order now, and stock up for some dynamite holiday reading. Feel free to use the coupon as many times as you need to before it expires, and pass it on to your friends and relatives."
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"How to create your first Personal Kanban and visualize your work."
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"PR is about managing media and analyst relations. A good PR company helps manage messaging and positioning targeted at the media. PR should generate interest from relevant trade magazines, blogs, editors, award bodies, analysts, etc. The goal is increase knowledge of your company and products among customers, industry experts, investors, etc. Specific PR campaigns should have more concrete objectives."
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"Marketing feels daunting because you are being shown a dozen yellow brick roads that weave off gloriously into the colorful horizon. That and the promise that the chosen path is flowering with ROI poppies. Walk forward in your customer’s shoes from before purchase; from pre-realization. How do you get to you?"
links for 2009-11-17
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"The current global financial crisis, visibly catalyzed by the rapid drop in securitized mortgage valuations in the summer 2007, has entailed a dramatic decrease in the availability of credit, wealth destruction linked to stock market valuations, the failure of banks and insurance companies, numerous other bankruptcies, the growth of governmental intervention, a deep and protracted recession, and a general rise in the uncertainty of Capitalistic institutions. It is in unsettled times such as these that hegemonic and taken-for-granted ideas and institutions may be challenged, and new alternatives cultivated. In the context of the early 21st century, it is the hegemonic ideals of markets, market-based solutions, and the ideology of neoliberalism that is on trial."
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"The majority of Council voted against the Anglin – Briere resolution to publish the Council meeting emails. The Council majority have said that if this is important to the citizens of Ann Arbor let them pay for it and do the work the Council claims is so expensive.
We ask your help in obtaining the information. There will be some minor expense but if shared by many it should not be prohibitive. The typical charge so far has been less than $3.00 per meeting for the requests.
because many sites will host material without charge, we believe our group can make the information publicly available at very little cost. In any case we can have some fun and a learning experience." -
"Extensive research has been done to analyze the phenomenon of open source software development from various perspectives. By contrast little is known about open source development of tangible objects, so–called open design, so far. Until recently, limitations to the availability of successful empirical examples of this ‘new innovation model’ outside software may have been a key reason for this gap.
This paper contributes to the literature on the open source mode of product development by providing a quantitative study (N = 85) of open design projects. Our goal is to explore the landscape of open source development in the world of atoms, to analyze project characteristics, structures, and success, and to investigate similarities and dissimilarities to open source software development."
links for 2009-11-16
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"What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, high usability, striking visual effects and all those "web 2.0" goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.
This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today's website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new personal ways of using the library."
links for 2009-11-14
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"The core of this wonderful museum is the Reuleaux collection of mechanisms and machines, a set of 19th century models built to demonstrate the elements of machine motion (more collections here). Also of interest are the tutorials and this extensive list of online references."
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"Think back to the dot-com era, when venture capitalists were spending all their money laying fiber-optic cable under the street. The right solution wasn’t for the Fed to raise interest rates until even punch-drunk venture capitalists could realize all this investment in fiber wouldn’t be profitable. The right solution was to take their money away. Give it to the poor, who will spend it on something useful, like food and clothing.
So those are Keynes’ prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that’s kind of what we did. The results were magical: the economy grew strongly, inequality fell away, everyone had jobs."
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"People forget what the markets were like in the late 1970's when the pits were dead and the average person wanted nothing to do with the US equity markets. The creation of 401k's and more gambling tables like the options exchanges helped to perk things up. This latest generation of jokers will not stop until they have trashed the markets once again."
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"We used to gasp at the way the Soviet Union stuck opponents of the regime in asylums. But the USSR is not the only country in history that has had a hard time seeing its adversaries as rational. The present generation of Americans is made uncomfortable by the idea that their country might have enemies whose enmity is the result of something other than fanaticism or mental illness. Maj Hasan’s colleagues, the Economist writes, say he thought the war on terror was a war on Islam. According to what we think Islam is, he is wrong. But according to a fundamentalist idea of what Islam is, he is right. There is rationality in such enmity, even if that rationality is built on different assumptions."
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"Everybody else has to stay in Special Torture Jail forever on accounta they have all come down with Schrodinger's Guilt. If they stay in the box they might be guilty, but if we open the box they might not be."
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"The i7 even represents a sizable (35%) performance increase over the i5 model and costs only $200 more. In fact, the i7 iMac benchmarks compare favorably to 2.93Ghz Quad-Core Mac Pro which costs significantly more."
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"I can't tell you how bizarre it is to see arguments I used to hear coming from the mouths of Montana Freemen like LeRoy Schweitzer in the 1990s — arguments that led to him embarking on an 81-day armed standoff with federal authorities, and resulting in him spending the rest of his natural life in a federal prison — coming from supposedly mainstream talk-show hosts on Fox News only 13 years later."
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"Unemployed per job posting in the top 50 U.S. metros."
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"Pot does not kill anyone, and he would have been content to make that his substitute for the mood-altering he seemed to have to have. But he was compelled to give it up, and now he is dead.
This fine man was 49 years old and leaves behind a young widow, mother and hundreds of grieving friends. He was loved by many for his gentleness and many charitable endeavors."
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"As noted on that page, we urge you to do two things. First, be aware that Apple is acting as a gatekeeper, and preventing you from getting the software that developers such as ourselves are trying to provide you. We wanted to ship a simple bug fix, and it took almost four months of slow replies, delays, and dithering by Apple. All the while, our buggy, and supposedly infringing version, was still available. There’s no other word for that but “broken”."
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"Columbia University's Computer Vision Labaratory is testing out a product called the BigShot, a digital camera intended to be taken apart and assembled by children, in order to remind them that yeah, someone actually designed and built this thing."
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"…We find that award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, both relative to their prior performance and relative to a matched sample of non-winning CEOs. At the same time, they extract more compensation following the awards, both in absolute amounts and relative to other top executives in their firms. They also spend more time on public and private activities outside their companies, such as assuming board seats or writing books. The incidence of earnings management increases after winning awards. The effects are strongest in firms with weak corporate governance. Our results suggest that the ex post consequences of media-induced superstar status for shareholders are negative."
links for 2009-11-13
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"According to the Center for Responsible Lending, issuers are using the power they still have for a few months to implement “any time any reason” price changes to raise the interest rates for large groups of customers. "
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"This isn't as simple as cutting out waste. The real project here is getting the medical system to define waste the same way consumers define waste: treatments that don't help people, and in fact hurt the bottom line. As it is, those treatments currently help the bottom line, and so are no more wasteful for the institution than a Best Buy salesman persuading you to buy an expensive HDMI cable you don't need."
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"An even more striking thing, perhaps, emerges in this second graph, namely that revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All the blue bars in the chart above represent revenues that go directly to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen noticeably.) This is mostly because of live revenues, but also because of the growing amount collected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much bigger chunk of industry revenues than most people realise."
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" The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler."
links for 2009-11-12
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"From the discovery of the 1898 International Dictionary to linotyping the entries to printing the last print on the vandercook to cutting the fingertabs of the deluxe edition, this video gives a quick overview of the process of creating the Pictorial Webster's fine press edition."
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"In October, 35.6 percent of unemployed persons were jobless for 27 weeks or more…."
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"The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town's municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA's spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts)."
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"The Ruby Development Center contains sample code, documentation, tools, and additional resources to help you build applications on Amazon Web Services."
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"The Chamber has pulled out all the stops in its effort to silence the activists. First, it sent an improper copyright takedown notice to the Yes Men's upstream provider, demanding that a parody website posted in support of the action be removed immediately and resulting in the temporary shutdown of not only the spoof site but hundreds of other sites hosted by May First/People Link. Next, the Chamber filed suit against the activists in federal court, claiming among other things the activism infringed their trademarks."
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