“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.”

“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):…”