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facepalm; this makes a lot of sense, but I have to say CH does a very poor job explaining very complicated design principles
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“The thesaurus might equate “disabled” with synonyms like “useless” and “mutilated,” but ground-breaking runner Aimee Mullins is out to redefine the word. Defying these associations, she hows how adversity — in her case, being born without shinbones — actually opens the door for human potential.”
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“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”
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“Simply put, you will not improve unless you strive to get better. You will not improve unless you:
look back on what you accomplished
reflect on what prevented you from doing even better
try to apply lessons learned the next time around
It almost seems so obvious that it’s not worth the 15 minutes that it takes your team. But, as anyone that has ever practiced regular retrospectives knows, they are an invaluable tool for identifying group problems that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.” -
“That someone with such a understanding of complex financial institutions highlights her naiveté, as if things are what they are, not because they are an equilibrium of borrower and saver preferences, but rather, the whims of The Captains of Industry in their top hats. To give her power, would merely reinforce what everyone in the industry knows, that Washington regulators are out-of-touch. For her, competition is simply a “race to the bottom to develop new ways to trick customers”, and so we should expect her to create a ‘stable’ industry, like in our education and postal industries, where there is limited competition but lots of guarantees, and little or no productivity growth.”
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“Where management has a significant portion of its net worth invested along with shareholders, agency costs are likely to be at a minimum. Shareholders can easily determine how invested management is in a company by looking in the same place that a company’s executive compensation can be found. Unfortunately, the use of equity swaps, becoming more common in the financial world, can render the information on management’s stake in the company essentially useless.”
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“But that isn’t the faux-narrative. Instead it boils down to “I hate smartypants.” And it is thereupon understandable that (being human) the boffins are losing patience with the new Know Nothings.”
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“Yes, make it part of the narrative. But even then, you’re often still explaining something which doesn’t really need explaining. Does it matter how the hyperspace drive works if all it needs to do is to get the protagonist from A to B? Too much exposition in science fiction stories has nothing to do with the story – it’s the author showing off their setting. For many readers, this is required. It’s immersion.”
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“The graph below shows examiner experience as grouped by technology center as of the end of FY2009.”
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“Documentation also fails when people are so intimidated that they’re afraid to sign anything. I can’t tell you — literally — how many conversations I’ve had with faculty or staff in which someone makes serious complaints about somebody else’s conduct, but refuses to write any of it down. They don’t want to get “dragged into anything.” From my perspective, this is worse than useless. I “know,” but I don’t. I don’t have anything that the accused could even rebut. And the one who told me often walks away thinking that my lack of follow-through is a sign of a sinister agenda, rather than of a basic epistemological flaw. (“The Administration knows about it, but doesn’t do anything.”) I can’t take anyone to task based on hearsay.”
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“The main body of the view will always render into the unnamed yield. To render content into a named yield, you use the content_for method.”
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“These are provocative ideas. Very analogous to the ideas found in the ping hub discussions and the peer to peer discussions. It would be fun to try and build a heuristic prefeching/pushing privacy respecting http proxy server swarm along these lines. No doubt somebody already has.”
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“That helped a little, but the forecast is for the vacancy rate to stay in the 14% to 15% range through 2012.”
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“In Wingnut circles, it’s known as the “Imprecatory Prayer.” Offered not just from select pulpits, but increasingly expressed through tweets and forwarded via email, this decidedly un-Christian Christian subculture has found its most enthusiastic advocates in a few Obama Derangement Syndrome-afflicted preachers—notably Orange County’s Wiley Drake and Arizona’s Steven L. Anderson.”
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“1. Keep the scope as simple as possible.… 2. Practice ‘Good Enough’.… 3. Kill extra features.… 4. Make it public, quick.”
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“Based on key investment criteria including valuation and management quality, we listed a few companies in the Capital Goods sector that appear to be attractive as well as a few that do not.”
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“To sum up, this is what Lloyd Blankfein meant by “performance”: Take massive sums of money from the government, sit on it until the government starts printing trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to restart the economy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the government at inflated prices — and then, when all else fails, start driving us all toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorsement of bubble economics. I mean, shit — who wouldn’t deserve billions in bonuses for doing all that?”
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“Scrum set the flywheel in motion and caused the rest of the IT process life cycle to respond. ITIL’s processes still form the solid core of service support and we’ve improved the processes’ capability to handle intense work velocity. The organization adapted by developing unprecedented speed in the ability to deliver production fixes and to solve root cause problems with agility.”
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“The Birchers have tried to rebrand themselves without changing their essential message, with a slick new Web site featuring a multicultural set of children emblazoned with American flags, announcing that they are simply “Standing for Family and Freedom.” But inside, the forums offer support for the 9⁄11 Truth-associated Texas gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina and tales that “the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘collapse of communism’ were not planned and implemented by the Soviet Union’s KGB.” DVDs for sale purport to tell the truth about alleged conservative impostor Newt Gingrich. Even Nelson Mandela is described as “nothing more than a communist, terrorist thug.””
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“Parsons The New School for Design announced a new MFA in Transdisciplinary Design set to launch in Fall 2010. The program is based in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons, which encompasses innovative programs that apply design thinking to study the intersection of cities, services and ecosystems.”
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“Facing a $2.8 billion deficit and pending insolvency, Washington State’s House Bill 3176 proposes changes to its B&O Royalty tax that would give Microsoft an estimated $100 million tax cut annually and possible amnesty for more than a billion dollars in past tax evasion.”
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“Throughout the years, I’ve seen some clever “money hacks” as a result of just keeping myself aware of the latest trends and tricks in personal finance. I’ve also had the great pleasure of reading all of your comments through the years and I know you guys are a very clever bunch, so I was curious what money hacks you use to get a little extra.”
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“The Blue Cash card’s tier is at $6,500, but by purchasing these coins you can are really looking at a tier of $4,000. As more coins become available and included into this program, you can drop that “real” tier down lower and lower. Not bad huh?”
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“And when it did, well, it was incredible. What’s below is just about the coolest video I have ever seen. And I mean that seriously. Click the “720” button and pay close attention at the 1:50 mark. You won’t miss it, the crowd in the audio will alert you…”
Monthly Archives: February 2010
links for 2010-02-18
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“As I emphasize out in a new book entitled “Saving State U,” the percentage of students taught by full-time, tenure-track faculty members per student at state universities has steadily declined in recent years. And it is likely to decline even further.”
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“Over the past year, VNL, based in Haryana, India, has reengineered the traditional technology of the dominant cellular standard, called GSM, in order to create base stations that only require between 50 and 150 watts of power, supplied by a solar-charged battery. The components can be assembled and booted up by two people and mounted on a rooftop in six hours.”
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“Joel has decided to chase venture capital for StackOverflow, but I can’t exactly figure out why. He lists six benefits that just don’t compute under even light scrutiny”
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“Using a numerical optimization program, Gilbert and colleagues showed it’s possible to reduce the amount of material in parabola-shaped cables by 0.3% if Hencky nets are used at their ends. The researchers have been working under the assumption that the well-know and simple parabolic-shaped cables represented the optimum bridge design until Gilbert realized that the only option was that the current wisdom was wrong.”
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‘“We haven’t seen anything like this before: a really deep recession combined with a really extended period, maybe as much as eight years, all told, of highly elevated unemployment,” Shierholz told me. “We’re about to see a big national experiment on stress.”’
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“The blue line is the number of workers unemployed for 27 weeks or more. The red line is the same data as a percent of the civilian workforce.
According to the BLS, there are a record 6.31 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks (and still want a job). This is a record 4.1% of the civilian workforce. (note: records started in 1948).”
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“Hell, if someone wants me to write a professional science-only blog where I talk solely about science in my capacity as a known scientist, then they’ll have to pay me like a professional (just like those whiny Nature bloggers get paid)–and I already have a full-time job, thank you. Like I said, that’s not what we do here. Nor will we: it cheapens the blogging.
An aside: Something that people seem to forget is that one of the strengths of ScienceBlogs, in my opinion, is that many bloggers here are professional research and educators, not full-time professional writers.”
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“One might almost say that the real problem isn’t predicting when the earth will shake, it’s organizing society so that it’s not a catastrophe when that happens.”
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“Anyone covering Washington, not excluding me, will sooner or later turn to a phrase like “refocus its image” or “a perception that the President has come to look” or “a pitch-perfect recital of the populist message,” because they come so easily, and because they make it unnecessary to say anything substantial, which means thinking hard and perhaps suffering the consequences. Still, as an exercise in accountability, political journalists should ask themselves from time to time: Would I write this about a war, or a depression? In the same vein, a government official once told me that the best way to cover Washington is as a foreign capital—as Baghdad, or Kabul.”
links for 2010-02-15
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“It was also realised that had the layout optimization solver been incorporated within a user-friendly interactive software package, then it would have been very much easier to rapidly change the design problem in response to feedback from other members of the design team…”
testing testing
LaTeX WordPress plugin might be working now:
Standard LaTeX equation markup can be used in the comments as well, as long as you wrap things in [latex]...[/latex] block-markup.
links for 2010-02-12
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“Two important men are having a careful conversation on military training. What do you call the guy who, having no particular competence or interest in the matter at hand, jumps in the conversation, systematically contradicts everyone with contrived arguments, ridicules the two competent discussants, orients the conversation on a completely different topic, then leaves the audience baffled and walks away, laughing? That Troll is Socrates in Plato’s Laches. True, Plato’s Socrates seldom hops in uninvited, and most of his interlocutors do not consider him noxious. Indeed one wonders why the whole city grew so irritated that they voted to condemn him to death. But Plato, like all philosophers and sophists, had a stake in defending his colleagues. In other views of Socrates (like Aristophanes’ caricature), he is unmistakably trollish. ”
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“An end to frivolous patents for business processes will be a blessing to online commerce. Meanwhile, the loss of patent protection for software could make programmers realise at last that they have more in common with authors, artists, publishers and musicians than they ever had with molecular architects and chip designers. In short, they produce expressions of ideas that are eminently copyrightable.”
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“There are some technical stories, though, which really do deliver something the business care about. You can find this out by asking, “Who cares if I don’t do this? Who cares if I don’t have an automated build? If I don’t write unit tests? If I don’t write acceptance tests?”
This is where the feature injection comes in. I’m flexing Chris Matts’s template a bit to do this; here’s how mine reads:
In order to
will need .”
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“We’ll learn so much about how much it really costs to bring high speeds to communities. We won’t have to rely on the carriers’ doomsaying about these expenses (”Hundreds of billions of dollars!”)”