These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• A VC: Invest­ing In The Cul­tural Revolution

  “In the mid­dle east, we’ve seen the power of the Inter­net in the Arab Spring. I believe we are in for a lot more of that sort of thing and that it will not be lim­ited to repres­sive gov­ern­ments, but to all large insti­tu­tions that seek to con­trol peo­ple and their free will. This is the cul­tural rev­o­lu­tion that I referred to in my talk with Erick at Dis­rupt. I think investors should be aware of what is com­ing and seek to invest in it where it is investable. I’m curi­ous what the AVC com­mu­nity thinks of this invest­ment the­sis and where we should be look­ing for oppor­tu­ni­ties that fit into this thesis.”
  
  disruptive-​​technology inter­net invest­ing venture-​​capital amus­ing disintermediation-​​targets startup-​​culture-​​must-​​die

• Time-​​saving ver­sus work-​​inducing software

  “What is the under­ly­ing thread? Time-​​saving soft­ware tends to be pro­duced by less civ­i­lized peo­ple.  Soft­ware writ­ten by large cor­po­ra­tions will prob­a­bly be work-​​inducing.”
  
  getting-​​shit-​​done effi­ciency cor­po­ra­tions soft­ware problem-​​solving reuse

• Weighty Mat­ters: Is sodium a dietary red her­ring for the effects of processed foods?

  “I think there’s at least one more pos­si­bil­ity: 3. Sodium’s isn’t a causal agent of dis­ease but instead given that processed foods are phe­nom­e­nally high in sodium, is a use­ful bio­marker for the degree of processed foods a person’s con­sum­ing, and that it’s the huge vol­umes of sugar and pul­ver­ized flour (that’s more often than not pack­aged with gobs of sodium) that’s actu­ally causal for car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease and death.”
  
  health­care sta­tis­tics medical-​​culture con­sumerism fast-​​food

• Why America’s Pissed: Cor­nel West, Robert Reich and More — The Daily Beast

  “First thing we’ve got to do is tell the truth. We live in an age where lies are just ubiq­ui­tous. The biggest lies are that free mar­kets are self-​​corrective, that indi­vid­u­als are rich because they’re smart, and that some­how Amer­ica became great because of eco­nomic growth as opposed to the moral courage of the cit­i­zens of all col­ors to fight for free­dom. We need a demo­c­ra­tic awak­en­ing. We need orga­niz­ing, mobi­liz­ing. We need to be will­ing to take a risk to change the world. The Obama moment of hope is over. ”
  
  economic-​​crisis com­men­tary Cornell-​​West bankers-​​should-​​start-​​avoiding-​​lampposts-​​right-​​about-​​now

• Groklaw — Red Hat Makes His­tory With Patent Set­tle­ment — Com­pat­i­ble with GPLv3

  “You know what this means? It means that those who claim the GPL iso­lates itself from stan­dards bod­ies’ IP pledges are wrong. It *is* pos­si­ble to come up with lan­guage that sat­is­fies the GPL and still acknowl­edges patents, and this is the proof. That means Microsoft could do it for OOXML if it wanted to. So who is iso­lat­ing whom? Thank you, Red Hat, for inno­vat­ing again to pro­tect the FOSS community.”
  
  open-​​source patents lit­i­ga­tion GPL prece­dent

• Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » U.S. house buy­ers are fac­tor­ing in the risk of a city or state declining?

  “The poten­tial home buyer today has seen pic­tures of Detroit, with for­mer neigh­bor­hoods being grad­u­ally reclaimed by Nature or plowed under into farm­land. Rec­og­niz­ing that his or her own city could become like that in 20 years time, the buyer will fac­tor that into the price he or she is will­ing to pay. In the event of a Detroit-​​style decline, the house becomes worth­less and the cost of own­er­ship for 10 years or so effec­tively tripled (10 years x 5 per­cent is approx­i­mately equal to 50 per­cent of the home’s value, then add another 100 per­cent for the cost of throw­ing the house away). Sup­pose the buyer thinks that this has a 20 per­cent prob­a­bil­ity of hap­pen­ing. Given a typ­i­cal person’s risk aver­sion, that might reduce the market-​​clearing price for a house by 25 percent.”
  
  eco­nom­ics housing-​​bubble recov­ery sub­ur­ban­ism sus­tain­abil­ity city-​​planning exper­i­ment

• Falken­blog: High Fre­quency Trad­ing Paper

  “The point is that in fast mov­ing mar­kets, one needs some­thing a lit­tle bet­ter than sim­ple his­tor­i­cal mov­ing aver­ages of daily clos­ing prices. This is bet­ter, and extend­ing the idea of ‘vol­ume time’ vs. ‘chrono­log­i­cal time’ is an intrigu­ing direc­tion. But one can also look at bid-​​ask spreads directly, or the VIX futures, or its etf, the VXX, and com­bi­na­tions, to gauge intra­day volatil­ity as well. Fur­ther, one can bet­ter esti­mate ‘buy vol­ume’ using the trans­ac­tion price rel­a­tive to the then extant bid-​​ask spread, rather than if the price was weakly increas­ing, though this then involves sync­ing the trade infor­ma­tion with quote infor­ma­tion, and for aca­d­e­mics such data are often hard to come by (fur­ther, quote infor­ma­tion is often 10 times as large).”
  
  learning-​​from-​​data financial-​​engineering trad­ing ana­lyt­ics nudge-​​targets

• Nanolaw with Daugh­ter (Ftrain​.com)

  “My daugh­ter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I’d posted ultra­sound scans online for friends and fam­ily. I didn’t know the scans had stegano­graphic thumbprints. A giant elec­tron­ics com­pany that made ultra­sound machines acquired a spec­u­la­tive law firm for many tens of mil­lions of dol­lars. The new legal divi­sion cut a deal with all five Big Socials to dig out con­tact infor­ma­tion for any­one who’d posted pic­tures of their babies in-​​utero. It turns out the ultra­sounds had no clear rights story; I didn’t actu­ally own mine. It sounds stu­pid now but we didn’t know. The first back­suits named mil­lions of peo­ple, and the Big Socials just caved, ripped up their pri­vacy poli­cies in exchange for a cut. So five months after I posted the ultra­sounds, one month before my daugh­ter was born, we received a let­ter (back then a paper let­ter) nam­ing myself, my wife, and one or more uniden­ti­fied fetal defen­dants in a suit. We faced, I learned, unspec­i­fied penal­ties for copy­right vio­la­tion and theft of trade secrets, and risked, it was implied, that my daugh­ter would be born bankrupt.”
  
  copy­right fic­tion law­suits read-​​this

• Did UCSD breach professor’s aca­d­e­mic free­dom? — SignOn​SanDiego​.com

  “The same month Elman wrote Bier­nacki a let­ter order­ing him not to pub­lish his work or dis­cuss it at pro­fes­sional meet­ings. Doing so, Elman wrote, could result in “writ­ten cen­sure, reduc­tion in salary, demo­tion, sus­pen­sion or dis­missal.“ Elman did not respond to a request for com­ment. But his con­cern, accord­ing to his let­ter to Bier­nacki, was that Biernacki’s research and man­u­script “may dam­age the rep­u­ta­tion of a col­league and there­fore may be con­sid­ered harass­ment.“ The Aca­d­e­mic Senate’s Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Assem­bly voted over­whelm­ingly Tues­day in favor of a res­o­lu­tion decry­ing the sit­u­a­tion after hear­ing a detailed and strongly worded report from its Com­mit­tee on Aca­d­e­mic Freedom.”
  
  academic-​​culture pol­i­tics wait-​​how-​​many-​​cultures-​​do-​​we-​​have-​​now-​​five-​​or-​​what

• Paul Gra­ham Offers Some Num­bers on the Suc­cess of Y Combinator’s Startups

  “Gra­ham notes that fund­ing, while easy to mea­sure, isn’t nec­es­sar­ily the best way to gauge the suc­cess of the program’s star­tups. “Get­ting funded is not suc­cess. It’s just some­thing that makes suc­cess more likely.” But if the stan­dard mea­sure­ment for suc­cess is value, and if value is mea­sured by exits, then the 6 years of YC’s exis­tence isn’t quite long enough to ade­quately assess this. Of the 300-​​plus star­tups, “just” 25 YC com­pa­nies have been acquired, 5 of them for over $10 mil­lion, and Gra­ham says that he’s esti­mated the val­ues of the rest of the com­pa­nies based on these acqui­si­tion fig­ures in order to gauge that the aver­age value of com­pa­nies Y Com­bi­na­tor has funded to be roughly $22 mil­lion. But com­ing up with an ade­quate mea­sure­ment for suc­cess isn’t really the point, says Gra­ham. “The real les­son here though is how long it takes to mea­sure per­for­mance in this busi­ness. We’re 6 years in, and we could eas­ily be off by 3x in either direc­tion. Startup out­comes are unpre­dictable, and the out­comes of their investors dou­bly so, because it’s hard to say whether the big suc­cesses are repeat­able, or if the investors just got lucky. Even 6 years in, all we can say is that the num­bers look encour­ag­ing so far.””
  
  met­rics business-​​culture star­tups Y-​​Combinator diver­sity portfolio-​​theory-​​in-​​practice

• Doc­tors are human | The Inci­den­tal Economist

  “…But this is Amer­ica. If you want to have the pro­ce­dure, so be it. You get to choose. That’s the way we roll. My ques­tion is, did your doc­tor rec­om­mend it? Did your doc­tor tell you about this study? Do you think that those who rec­om­mend and per­form this pro­ce­dure don’t know about this study, and that if only they had this evi­dence they’d stop? Or, do you think physi­cians are influ­enced by biases and their per­sonal beliefs? Me? I think they’re human.”
  
  medical-​​culture sta­tis­tics health­care mar­ket­ing cognitive-​​psychology evidence-​​based

• Care­givers Using Copy­right Law To Shield Them­selves From Pub­lic Crit­i­cism From Patients | ThinkProgress

  “When I walked into the offices of Dr. Ken Cirka, I was look­ing for cleaner teeth, not mate­r­ial for an Ars Tech­nica story. I needed a new den­tist, and Yelp says Dr. Cirka is one of the best in the Philadel­phia area. The recep­tion­ist handed me a clip­board with forms to fill out. After the usual patient infor­ma­tion form, there was a “mutual pri­vacy agree­ment” that asked me to trans­fer own­er­ship of any pub­lic com­men­tary I might write in the future to Dr. Cirka. Sur­prised and a lit­tle out­raged by this, I got into a lengthy dis­cus­sion with Dr. Cirka’s office man­ager that ended in me refus­ing to sign and her show­ing me the door.”
  
  via:poormojo copy­right medical-​​culture lia­bil­ity com­plaints lawyers

• Hey, Remem­ber When Newt Gin­grich Was Spon­sored By a Human Chip-​​Implant Com­pany? | BNET

  “The issue of whether Amer­i­cans should receive sub­cu­ta­neous wire­less RFID chip implants that can link to their elec­tronic med­ical records emerged again in Wis­con­sin this week, where for­mer gov­er­nor and Bush Admin­is­tra­tion sec­re­tary of Health and Human Ser­vices Tommy Thomp­son is con­sid­er­ing a run for Sen­ate. Thomp­son was a for­mer board mem­ber of VeriChip, the com­pany that renamed itself Pos­i­tiveID, and once appeared on CNBC with Pos­i­tiveID CEO Scott Sil­ver­man to advo­cate that every­one receive a chip from birth…”
  
  Newt-​​Gingrich pol­i­tics woops how’s-that-whole-Number-of-the-Beast-thing-going?

• Irish Steam Trol­ley — Crooked Timber

  we need these in Ann Arbor
  
  public-​​transportation pho­tog­ra­phy nanohis­tory

• Cul­ture­Works — Greater Philadelphia

  “Cul­tural CoWork­ing: Cul­ture­Works is cur­rently devel­op­ing Philadelphia’s first cowork­ing space specif­i­cally for the cul­ture com­mu­nity in Cen­ter City. This space will pro­vide net­work­ing, peer-​​to-​​peer sup­port, tech­nol­ogy, and other resources to indi­vid­ual cre­ative work­ers, start-​​ups, and small organizations.”
  
  cowork­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion workantile-​​exchange