‘These devel­op­ments sug­gest that the United States is spend­ing huge amounts of money in ways that are actu­ally mak­ing Amer­i­cans less secure, not only against irreg­u­lar insur­gents, but also against smart coun­tries build­ing dif­fer­ent sorts of mil­i­taries. And the prob­lem goes well beyond weapons and other high-​​tech items. What’s miss­ing most of all from the U.S. military’s arse­nal is a deep under­stand­ing of net­work­ing, the loose but lively inter­con­nec­tion between peo­ple that cre­ates and brings a new kind of col­lec­tive intel­li­gence, power, and pur­pose to bear — for good and ill…..”’

“Cobot has found a way to strike the bal­ance between func­tion­al­ity that helps a cowork­ing space run (like ana­lyt­ics and billing sup­port), but also paid care­ful atten­tion to the needs of the peo­ple in the space, help­ing them get signed up, ori­ented, and solve their own prob­lems so we don’t have to do it for them. They even have a sup­port ticket sys­tem for our mem­bers when some­thing goes wrong. Even the pric­ing model is based on the mem­bers instead of the desks.

This is smart. Very smart.

Being peo­ple ori­ented is what’s got­ten Indy­Hall as far as it has, and see­ing soft­ware that sup­ports that is extremely excit­ing for me.”

“The Optio W90 can sur­vive those four-​​foot drops and is water­proof to 20-​​feet. You can even take pics under­wa­ter and in tem­per­a­tures that are freez­ing. This sounds like the per­fect cam­era to strap to the back of a pen­guin as he is attacked by a seal while float­ing on an iceberg.”

Dammit, why did these not exist when I was a kid and my Dad was try­ing to teach me this stuff??

lovely

“More than 90 per­cent of insur­ance mar­kets in more than 300 met­ro­pol­i­tan areas are “highly con­cen­trated,” as defined by the Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion, accord­ing to the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion. A 2008 sur­vey by the Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­ity Office found the five largest providers of small group insur­ance con­trolled 75 per­cent or more of the mar­ket in 34 states, and 90 per­cent or more in 23 of those states, a sig­nif­i­cant increase in con­cen­tra­tion since the G.A.O.’s 2002 survey.”

“Some peo­ple want to start doing some Rails 3.0 Beta work on Ruby 1.9.2 on their devel­op­ment machines. I’m toss­ing this up here to have some­thing to point peo­ple to when they have questions.”

“The cli­mate of the city is altered, in other words, lit­er­ally from the ground up; using the func­tional equiv­a­lent of ter­res­tri­ally pow­ered ovens, oth­er­wise botan­i­cally impos­si­ble species can health­ily take root.

This domes­ti­ca­tion of geot­her­mal energy, and the use of it for pur­poses other than electricity-​​generation, raises the fas­ci­nat­ing pos­si­bil­ity that heat itself, if care­fully and specif­i­cally redi­rected, can utterly trans­form urban space. ”

“Per­son­ally, I’d love to see some of these prob­lems above fixed and I’d love to be able to really nod my head in agree­ment when I read that Yahoo is seri­ous about a more “open and rel­e­vant web.” That would be much bet­ter than me shak­ing my head in dis­agree­ment and writ­ing letters.”

“Lately, I’ve been won­der­ing if sit­ting qui­etly in a café, pre­tend­ing to read a news­pa­per, and not writ­ing is the most earnest expres­sion in our age: no echoes of lan­guage, noth­ing to reblog, just pure unmit­i­gated self sit­ting with self. I might, after a time of blank star­ing, find myself con­struct­ing sen­tences in my head, maybe a para­graph, sim­ply let­ting the words roll around in my mind. I will not. I repeat. I will not write them down. They are my secret sen­tences, not yours.”

“I would cut AnnAr​bor​.com some slack if they had made the case for our state as a whole. But instead they indulged in the same old ”Michi­gan blows but Ann Arbor is great” garbage this town has been gag­ging up for decades.

No won­der the rest of the state can’t stand us. Ann Arbor is like that greasy dweeb in col­lege who’d show up at par­ties and smugly explain how all my favorite bands and movies sucked.

God, I hated that guy.”

“If you use Word­Press for your web­site or blog, there are lots of ways you can con­nect it to social media, and con­nect social media to your site via those nifty plu­g­ins. The right plu­g­ins can make social con­tent man­age­ment eas­ier and reduce fric­tion when it comes to reader sharing.

Whether you’re look­ing to eas­ily share your con­tent on social net­works, make it eas­ier for oth­ers to share your con­tent, or sim­ply make your own site more engag­ing, here are 7 great plu­g­ins that will make your Word­Press site more social.”

“The rest of the items in SEMAT’s pro­posal are mush. Of course our the­o­ries need to address tech­no­log­i­cal and social issues. Of course they need wide sup­port by sev­eral com­mu­ni­ties to be suc­cess­ful. Of course they must be flex­i­ble. But what should they con­sist of? What stake is SEMAT putting on the ground? Unfor­tu­nately, beyond a wish to be more like an engi­neer­ing dis­ci­pline, this pro­posal is com­pletely vague, and there­fore I can­not sup­port it.”

“So it prob­a­bly would not take much for politi­cians to be per­suaded that the press is essen­tial to democ­racy, and that its sur­vival … depends on gov­ern­ment sup­port. Adver­tis­ing rev­enue would be replaced by gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies, rais­ing pre­dictable ques­tions about the impact on con­tent.
The alter­na­tive is to focus on what com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­ogy can­not do: cre­ate rather than trans­mit a good story or a good pol­icy. There will always be a mar­ket for qual­ity. The dis­rup­tion caused by emerg­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nolo­gies con­sists in the fact that the best pens may not be on the staffs of news­pa­pers, and that poli­cies need not be for­mu­lated only in the cor­ri­dors of government.”

“So why not incor­po­rate it into a sav­ings account? Take a small inter­est rate cut, say a tenth of a per­cent, from each sav­ings account, and then ran­domly give that to a few mem­bers, con­di­tional on them sav­ing money. I think it’s bril­liant, and it doesn’t sur­prise me that it’s started with credit unions, where some of the most con­sumer friendly inno­va­tion is being tried. Where most com­mer­cial banks are look­ing to pay­day lenders for inno­va­tion, credit unions appear to be look­ing at cut­ting edge behav­ioral “nudge” style work for inno­va­tions to help peo­ple build their finan­cial lives. How cool is that?”

“… these spaces have been shown to make sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the energy and robust­ness of the local entre­pre­neur­ial envi­ron­ment, and have become an increas­ingly com­mon way for cities to pro­mote them­selves as sup­port­ive of the new breed of entre­pre­neur­ial venture.”

“If a d.j. can thread together twenty dif­fer­ent songs and pack­age the end prod­uct as her own, why can’t a writer? This seems to be the ques­tion Hege­mann is using as a defense. Orig­i­nal con­tent, then, becomes sub­or­di­nate to con­text, mean­ing that as long as a newer, larger work is being cre­ated, por­tions of prior works are fair game.”

“This is the back­drop to the papers that we have col­lected in our spe­cial issue. Its aim is to present work that asks ‘what is hap­pen­ing in the sub­urbs, in terms of the built form, the econ­omy and social rela­tions’. They are not nec­es­sar­ily writ­ten ‘in defense of sub­urbs,’ but engage sub­urbs as if they matter. ”

“I don’t know about you, but for most of us “the best solu­tion avail­able in the mar­ket” is the one that costs the least and does what I want it to. If it’s free, even bet­ter. Can we say “Google”?”

“Most orga­ni­za­tions have seri­ous prob­lems with data man­age­ment because it’s expen­sive to do sys­tem­atic cura­tion, which includes doc­u­ment­ing the con­text in which data were gen­er­ated or derived, includ­ing the instru­ments involved, the pro­to­cols and such,” Palmer said. “But that also requires car­ing for the data and mak­ing them avail­able to other sci­en­tists. It takes seri­ous com­mit­ment and investment.”

“In this paper, we sig­nif­i­cantly improve a pre­vi­ous result by the same author show­ing the exis­tence of a weakly uni­ver­sal cel­lu­lar automa­ton with five states liv­ing in the hyper­bolic 3D-​​space. Here, we get such a cel­lu­lar automa­ton with three states only.”

“Every human likes choices. But today’s fast route plan­ning algo­rithms usu­ally com­pute just a sin­gle route between source and tar­get. There are begin­nings to com­pute alter­na­tive routes, but this topic has not been stud­ied thor­oughly. Often, the aspect of mean­ing­ful alter­na­tive routes is neglected from a human point of view. We fill in this gap by sug­gest­ing math­e­mat­i­cal def­i­n­i­tions for such routes. As a sec­ond con­tri­bu­tion we pro­pose heuris­tics to com­pute them, as this is NP-​​hard in general.”

“Con­trib­u­tors are invited to sub­mit papers on aspects of zom­bies and vam­pires as they relate to texts and media across cul­tural boundaries.”

“One can only ges­ture broadly at the cav­ernous dio­ra­mas of fal­lacy and illogic on dis­play here, but a good place to begin is with this column’s woe­ful open­ing asser­tion that the C. Wright Mills clas­sic The Power Elite—published in 1956, the puta­tive hey­day of balmy aris­to­cratic man­age­ment of the invest­ment economy—somehow chron­i­cled the ongo­ing social dom­i­nance of WASP pri­mo­gen­i­ture. Mills did argue that old fam­ily for­tunes con­tin­ued to loom dis­pro­por­tion­ately over the country’s long-​​term wealth profile—but more impor­tant, he main­tained that the defin­ing struc­tural fea­tures of the power elite arose from its mas­tery of the tech­no­cratic mil­i­tary state cre­ated in the first flush of the Cold War.”

“You’d think by now that pop media would have got­ten beyond the idea that nerdi­ness leads to crime. Appar­ently they haven’t. I am cring­ing as I await the next round of evil geek TV spe­cials, fea­tur­ing mad sci­en­tists build­ing bio­log­i­cal com­put­ers while play­ing “Mazes and Mon­sters” and plot­ting the mur­ders of their colleagues.”

“Deep-​​down, the real issue for offi­cials is that they are squea­mish that Stack may have scored a rhetor­i­cal point or two about elite behav­ior and oli­garchi­cal eco­nomic poli­cies in his oth­er­wise unhinged, online rant. Evad­ing the truth makes for bad policies.”

“Works by Ganga Devi (1928 — 1991), found in the book Ganga Devi: Tra­di­tions and Expres­sions in Mith­ila Paint­ing by Jyotin­dra Jain.”

“These could be investors buy­ing REOs for cash flow, condo “recon­ver­sions”, builders chang­ing the intent of new con­struc­tion (started as con­dos but became rentals), flip­pers becom­ing land­lords, or home­own­ers rent­ing their pre­vi­ous homes instead of selling.

As Scott Mon­roe noted, this huge surge in rental sup­ply — what he calls the “gray or shadow mar­ket” — has pushed down rents, and pushed the rental vacancy rate to record lev­els. Yes, peo­ple are dou­bling up with friends and fam­ily dur­ing the reces­sion, and some renters are now buy­ing again, but the main rea­son for the record vacancy rate is the surge in sup­ply. Even­tu­ally many of these “gray mar­ket” rentals will be sold as homes again — keep­ing the exist­ing home sup­ply ele­vated for years.”