'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 AnnArbor.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."