"The system in which they are relevant is not called the market economy, not the financial system or capitalism, but democracy. Democracy is about a community shaping its future together. And the media, in all its forms – print, broadcast and digital – is one of its most important creative forces. The proof of the relevance of the press is 177 years old, begins in 1832 and continues right up to the present day. It arises out of the entire history of German democracy."

Elisabeth Hendrickson builds a suite of diorama scenes based on her WordCount Simulation of project management, a great exercise I've had the pleasure to participate in, and which I recommend to anybody working in "knowledge work".

"And yeah, almost none of it was funny — and as much as I wish I could, I'm not sure I can make it funny. Taken as a whole, it was too dispiriting, infuriating and flat-out exhausting to be funny.

So, maybe the only way to go — the best parting shot to take — is to simply say a hearty "fuck you, 2009" and look only forward.

I'll begin doing that in a couple of days. For now, though, I'm crawling back under my desk and hiding. I just don't trust this year; it's still got some fight left in it and, like I said, 48 hours is a long time."

"Lawyers representing Demi Moore sent a threatening letter to Boing Boing over the holidays which demanded that we remove a post I published in November, or face legal consequences. In the referenced Boing Boing post, I published photographer Anthony Citrano's speculation that a recent W Magazine cover image of the actress may have been crudely manipulated by magazine staff to alter her hip, and appear thinner."

"On a distributed Scrum project, individual team members need to meet each other face to face. If the whole team cannot get together, one or two members from each team, at least, should spend time visiting team members in other cities. Think of them as ambassadors. I’ve found that the personal relationships established by ambassadors can be extremely valuable even long after the ambassador returns to native soil."

"Now we can add to all the backslapping and self congratulatory rhetoric about avoiding a full-blown crisis, another financial milestone – Australia’s debt to GDP ratio has now broken through 100%. That’s right, Australian households collectively hold more debt than the entire Australian economy earns in a year. Let the good times roll!"

"[T]he broad impact of the recession is clear in hundreds of thousands of new cases across the judicial system, including people challenging their real estate taxes, home foreclosures, contract disputes and family offenses."

"There’s a kind of perverse joy that comes from watching a truly awful movie musical."

"Looking at these, you would hope to achieve a low lefthand starting point (low cost), a high righthand point (high longevity), and a thick line (lots of doctor visits.)

The USA line looks like it was drawn by someone who got the instructions backwards — a very high lefthand starting point (huge cost), a mediocre righthand point (middlin' longevity), and a hairlike line thickness (scanty doctor visits, less than 4 per year.)"

"There are a number of ways to “solve” mazes but there’s a wide scope for you to be as straightforward or as clever as you like with this challenge (tip: I’d love to see some clever/silly solutions!). Your “solvable?” and “steps” methods could share algorithms or you might come up with alternate ways to be more efficient in each case. Good luck!"

"This “highly sophisticated investor” argument has been used by Goldman, other banks and a remarkably high number of journalists (in my opinion just repeating the crap they have been fed by their sources) as a way of getting the banks off the hook. But it is a fundamentally flawed argument. The CDO bonds that AIG insured were rated AAA. If you have to be a rocket scientist to understand the investment and if anything short of perfect analysis of the bonds means you will be blown up – then by definition the bonds are not AAA."

"And for those who keep looking to biology for an answer, the fundamental yet rarely asked question is why natural selection designed our brains so that we’re in tune with our fellow human beings and feel distress at their distress, and pleasure at their pleasure. If the exploitation of others were all that mattered, evolution should never have got into the empathy business. But it did, and the political and economic elites had better grasp that in a hurry."

"We've been meaning to post this list of links to the language essays of Robert Cumbow for ages. He's a lawyer in our home town of Seattle. Enjoy!"

"When producing a movie, everything stems back to this box: IDEA. In the 1940s, these were the sources of ideas: "Play," "Short Story or Novel," "Newspaper Story or Current Event," "Original Story," "Magazine Article," or "Historical Incident." Way off on the left, however, there's one additional source that's not shown above: "Vice President in Charge of Production." If you want something unoriginal done that isn't in print or in the history books, go talk to the VP, he'll get it done. On another note: this particular flowchart is one of the few places the words "Restaurants," "Mimeograph," "Arsenal," "Publicity," and "Bits & Extras" fit together so well. From the 20th Century Fox flowcharts collection."

"Franken's amendment is driving the Republicans crazy because they basically voted to protect rapists and are now paying a political price for that. And now they are whining that Franken was somehow "uncollegial" because the amendment put them in an embarrassing position (which makes me wonder how many other things issues are swept under the rug because it would make members of the opposition uncomfortable.)"

"The point is that there was indeed a huge CA bubble in the 80s, which burst painfully. Nor was this an obscure bit of knowledge: in fact, people like Calculated Risk and yours truly were quite explicitly using the great California bubble of the 80s as a model for what was going to happen nationally.

This whole episode makes me think considerably worse of my former department head."

"Yet this apparently uneventful transfer of power concealed profound alterations in the relationship between the English crown and its subjects, and set into motion the formation of a new kind of modern state, whose characteristics – vigorous promotion of economic development, broad religious tolerance, and free competition among political interests – still define liberal democracies today.

In his magisterial new book (for once, this overused adjective is warranted), the historian Steve Pincus takes aim at the traditional narrative of the Glorious Revolution, and sets out to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it was more than worthy of the name: a revolution that was contentious, sometimes violent and even bloody, that pitted two radical factions against one another and transformed England."

"Of course, it’s not uncommon to see the term “rank hubris” applied in the general vicinity of Larry Summers. But let’s be clear, here: what Summers did could in no way be considered a hedge, under any common definition of the term. He was indulging in interest-rate speculation, just like Robert Citron. I think it’s fair to say that no previous Harvard president would ever have considered himself qualified to do such a thing, but Summers never let such considerations stop him. And his alma mater is now paying the 10-digit price."

"The use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in scientific computing is becoming increasingly common. GPUs are low cost parallel processors that can readily be exploited for many types of general purpose computation. Recently, the computational intelligence community has started to develop for the GPU platform. This web page is primarily dedicated to the use of GPUs as a platform for Genetic Programming. "

"The economic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. public and society is unraveling at an increased rate. You may have missed it in the mainstream news media, but statistical societal indicators are reading red across the board. Let’s look at the top 15 statistics that prove we are under attack."

"In fact, there has been only one top nation that ever avoided the habit, and that was the United States. Upon finding itself the dominant power at the end of World War II., the United States had the opportunity to impose its own vision of international trade. And it did.
At this crucial moment, something special happened. At the behest of Marshall and his advisers, America became the first power in history to deliberately establish countermercantilist commerce flows. Nations crippled by war or mismanagement were allowed to maintain tariffs, keeping out American goods, while sending shiploads from their factories to the United States. Each administration since Marshall's time, regardless of political party, has abided by this compact—to such a degree that the world's peoples now simply take it for granted!"

"It doesn’t have to be science, though that is where I found these refugees from the aristocracy, most often. It might also be the arts, or starting a new company from scratch, in a completely different field. Any way you look at it, this trend has to be viewed with admiration.

Alas, it may also be one of the principal reasons that American capitalism is going down the toilet. Because… who is left behind, minding the store? Oh. Yeah. I already answered that question. "

"Perhaps by coincidence, three new papers in this week’s issue of the NEP-DGE report deal with forecasting. Kolasa, Rubaszek and Skrzypczyński says that DSGE models perform remarkably well. Bache, Jore, Mitchell and Vahey claim that VAR models with structural breaks do better, but of course structural breaks cannot be predicted with a VAR. Gupta, Kabundi and Miller show that DSGE models of real estate markets are better with turning points, which are the most difficult statistic to forecast."

"Last month 52,000 temps were added, greater than the number of new workers in any other category. Not even health care and government, stalwarts through the long recession, did better.

“Sometimes we’re asked by a company to bring back ex-employees as temps,” said Joanie Ruge, a senior vice president of Adecco. Some are even ex-employees who have been laid off. “That does happen,” she said."

"Rich is right that Americans have grown cynical. But the extremists of right and left have exploited that cynicism, have raised big money by distorting the truth, have denigrated the slow, tortuous compromise that is at the heart of progress in any real democracy. Obama's is the least cynical of the seven presidencies I've covered. It is a presidency that took effective action to prevent a depression, that has refused to engage in arrogant jingoism in its dealing with the rest of the world and–most important–spent its political capital on the most important piece of social legislation, health care reform, of the past 45 years."

"More than that, it represents a rejection of the view that the solution for all problems is to cut some taxes and remove some regulations. In that sense, what’s happening now, for all the disappointment it represents for progressives, is a historic moment.

And let’s also not fail to take note of those who had a chance to join in this historic moment, and punted."

"WebSockets in HTML5 change all of that as they were designed from the ground up to be data agnostic (binary or text) with support for full-duplex communication. WebSockets are TCP for the web-browser. Unlike BOSH or equivalents, they require only a single connection, which translates into much better resource utilization for both the server and the client. Likewise, WebSockets are proxy and firewall aware, can operate over SSL and leverage the HTTP channel to accomplish all of the above – your existing load balancers, proxies and routers will work just fine."

"We can add the inadequate funding of unemployment compensation programs to the ever growing list of things that the crisis has revealed need to be fixed."

"We continue this protocol until the future date (1 May 2010) at which time we upload our final version of the master document. For this final version, we include the URL of a web site where the .pdf documents of all of our past forecasts can be downloaded and independently checked for consistent MD5 and SHA-2 hashes. For convenience, we will include a summary of all of our forecasts in this final document."

"Suppose you are given a simple closed curve in the plane. (“Simple” means the curve does not intersect itself, “closed” means the curve ends at the same point where it begins.) Can you always find four points on the curve which form the vertices of a square?"

"What makes my job really interesting is that these clients are in different industries and are using different technologies. So we have pulled together a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight."

"Up until World War I, the archetypal manufacturing CEO was production oriented—usually an engineer or inventor of some kind. Even as late as the 1930s, business school curriculums focused mostly on production. Khurana notes that many schools during this era had mini-factories on campus to train future managers."

"This meant that I would have to edit the .xslt files. The best way to do this is to install your own copy of MultiMarkdown from Fletcher. This installs MMD in ~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown. There, in the XSLT folder, you will find all the .xslts we will be messing with. Anyway, here were the four things I wanted to do, and a present at the end:
Get MMD to use XeLaTeX
Get MMD to use biblatex / MLA
Get MMD to let me type LaTeX straight into the Scrivener window
Get MMD to double space for me
GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE FILE!"

"The mean spectra were provided as input sequences to the Implicit Context Representation Cartesian Genetic Programming algorithm (IRCGP)[14,15]. IRCGP uses evolutionary computing methodology to learn classifiers that are capable of distinguishing between data classes. Induced classifiers take the form of programmatic expressions applied to particular offsets within the input data sequences. These expressions are composed from a set of simple mathematical functions. Both the choice and connectivity of the functions, and the choice of offsets used within the input sequences, are determined by the algorithm's evolutionary process. The input sequences were divided equally into training and test sets. To prevent over-learning, training of the classifiers was stopped once classification accuracy of the test sequences started to fall."

"Welcome to definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2009. First up – What is open source hardware? These are projects in which the creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware – they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source software like Linux, but this hardware centric."

" This memo defines the format for specifying iCalendar object methods.
An iCalendar object method is a set of usage constraints for the
iCalendar object. For example, these methods might define scheduling
messages that request an event be scheduled, reply to an event
request, send a cancellation notice for an event, modify or replace
the definition of an event, provide a counter proposal for an
original event request, delegate an event request to another
individual, request free or busy time, reply to a free or busy time
request, or provide similar scheduling messages for a to-do or
journal entry calendar component. The iCalendar Transport-indendent
Interoperability Protocol (iTIP) defined in [ITIP] is one such
scheduling protocol."

"IndieVest Pictures evaluates vast numbers of packaged feature film projects and scripts developed by well-known filmmakers and industry professionals. Those projects that we believe are truly unique and compelling are selected for further development by IndieVest Pictures. Of these, only the very best are ultimately admitted into the Premiere Portfolio.

As an IndieVest Member, you’ll gain ‘first look’ access to the Premiere Portfolio, and be able to view all the independent feature films under development by IndieVest Pictures."

"It's not the CG that looks weird; if you shot an ordinary scene with the same 3d technique it would look boring and flat in 2d (indeed, the difficulty of emphasizing depth by adjusting focus on a consumer video camera is a big part of what makes it 'look like video'). So the primary reason Avatar is a Big Deal for Hollywood is that Cameron seems to have succeeded in developing a 3d photographic technique that is much more compelling and realistic than the standard fixed-angle 3d which has been used until now, which actually emphasizes the separation of the audience from the action. And in order to fully appreciate this…yes, you'll need to go to the theater."

"Email has become more like a habitat than an application. It is used for a wide range of tasks such as information management and for coordination and collaboration in organizations. Our research shows that email is the place in which a great deal of work is received and delegated and is a growing portal for access to online publications and information services. Indeed, users have been seen to co-opt email as a personal information management (PIM) tool. This follows from what we have found to be a common tendency of knowledge workers, which is to embed personal information management directly into their favorite workspaces. In this article, we explore further these new and unanticipated uses that are made of email, and suggest potential design ideas to support them better. We present the findings from four months of fieldwork conducted at three companies."

"There are important uses for financial products, even complicated ones, so I don't want to impugn innovation generally, but I also don't want to adopt the position that it was all useful – it clearly wasn't and stronger regulatory oversight is needed. As for the defense of financial models and innovation described above, the statement that innovation generally is the source of economic growth, therefore financial innovation must also be good, isn't much help. Similarly, if saying "models benefit many fields, such as airline safety, and not only financial markets" is the best defense of risk models available, that's telling."

"Although much comes in, there is still plenty for us to seek out and acquire. We are omnivorous in our appetite for material printed in the United States before 1877—if we don’t already have it, we want it, and even if we do have it, we might want another copy if it is slightly different or in better condition than the one we have. We also add secondary materials to the collections to support research here."

"The best way to approach auction type situations like this is often to simply list the maximum price you can afford. Your instance(s) will get run if and when the spot instance price reaches that price and you will regularly get charged less depending on what other users are bidding for their instances.

Though I don’t recommend trying to chase the spot instance price around, it is natural to be curious about what others have been paying and whether or not you might have a chance to get in with your bid."

"Spot Instances are a new way to purchase and consume Amazon EC2 Instances. They allow customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids meet or exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances. Spot Instances are complementary to On-Demand Instances and Reserved Instances, providing another option for obtaining compute capacity."

"But health care is not zero-sum villainy. This post is not arguing that insurers are better than you think and providers worse. This post is arguing that nature of both groups is beside the point. They work within the market the government constructs. And both the market for insurance and the market for health care need reform. But we're comfortable reforming only the market for insurance, and so we are leaving half — or maybe more than half — the job undone."

QOTW: "There's a reason so many super-villains have graduate degrees."

"I can understand why a retailer would want to use my copyright as bait to lock in readers—but exactly how is this good for me? This is why I'm not selling digital downloads of the professional readings of With a Little Help. With so much friction and goofiness in the marketplace, I'd rather give the MP3s away under a Creative Commons license and solicit donations through PayPal. My listeners don't want DRM. They want to get their books with a minimum of hassle. But, for the record, I'd put my books in Audible and the iTunes Store in a hot second if only they'd sell them on the same terms that I'd be willing to buy them: no DRM and no license agreement except “don't violate copyright law.”"

"Protovis composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots. Unlike low-level graphics libraries that quickly become tedious for visualization, Protovis defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to simplify construction.
Protovis is free and open-source, provided under the BSD License. It uses JavaScript and SVG for web-native visualizations; no plugin required (though you will need a modern web browser)! Although programming experience is helpful, Protovis is mostly declarative and designed to be learned by example."

Grammatical Evolution Ruby Exploratory Toolkit

"Faro Measuring System's Laser ScanArm might bring back bad memories of the dentist, but in fact it's another 3D scanning solution–this one mounted to an articulated arm that not only helps you hold it steady, but records the scanner's position in space. Faro's Orlando Perez shoots and captures a mini Lady Liberty:…"

"This is the best and most amazing thing we saw at the conference that wasn't directed by James Cameron: Zebra Imaging boldly proclaims that they "produce the most innovative holographic products and technology in the world," and after an in-person demo, you walk away convinced. Words can't describe what you need to see with your eyes, so check it out (demonstrated by Zebra's Michael Klug):…"

"We’re still in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of wilfully plagiarising a young and innovative upstart’s work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms. Of course, it just hits that much closer to home when all your years of hard work and effort to create something unique are stolen so brazenly. All the more ironic considering Microsoft has often been leading the charge on fighting for stronger IP laws and combating software piracy in China."

"Fuse* is unlike any Keynote theme you've ever used before. We began with a structured, layer-driven framework – vibrant color infusing translucent panels from beneath, balanced against high-visibility focal accents – all set into a striking side-dominant arrangement that only hints at the potential energy hidden underneath."

http://www.p22.com/ihof/stickley.html for the actual family