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

• What if Inter­ac­tiv­ity is the New Pas­siv­ity? Jonathan Sterne /​ McGill Uni­ver­sity | Flow

  “What if all the bad things that media crit­ics have been said about pas­siv­ity for the past cen­tury or two are now equally applic­a­ble to all the demands to inter­act, to par­tic­i­pate? What if inter­ac­tiv­ity is now one of the cen­tral hinges through which power works? In many moments today, the most com­pli­ant ges­ture we can make is to con­sent to inter­act on the terms pre­sented to us by our soft­ware and machines. This pull is espe­cially strong in those com­mer­cial plat­forms that cel­e­brate their own dif­fer­ence from the so-​​called pas­sive media of pre­vi­ous decades, and in the process mon­e­tize their users’ par­tic­i­pa­tion either directly or indi­rectly. What if—from time to time—we chose not to iden­tify with the inter­ac­tive promise of new media plat­forms or for that mat­ter new media art? What if, when the new media savants lam­bast so-​​called old media audi­ences as denizens of pas­siv­ity and ide­ol­ogy, we say, “yes, that’s me”?”
  
  a-​​bit-​​too-​​theoryish cultural-​​norms ingroup-​​outgroup new-​​media

• How Can Her­bert Spencer’s 1892 Revi­sions to his Social Sta­t­ics Help Us Under­stand Con­ser­v­a­tive Oppo­si­tion to the Indi­vid­ual Man­date? | Rortybomb

  “But I think it’s clear what his real objec­tion was: uni­ver­sal suf­frage has the poten­tial to advance social­is­tic causes, inter­fer­ing with his laissez-​​faire project. From his auto­bi­og­ra­phy: “Another exten­sion of the fran­chise since made…will inevitably be fol­lowed by a still more rapid growth of social­is­tic leg­is­la­tion.” When he real­ized women’s equal­ity could poten­tially inter­fere with laissez-​​faire eco­nom­ics, it was time for women’s equal­ity to get cut from his over­all the­ory of a bet­ter world. He would rather muti­late his intel­lec­tual project instead of allow­ing his ene­mies to con­tinue to build their gov­er­nance project.”
  
  Herbert-​​Spencer laissez-​​faire cor­po­ratism cap­i­tal­ism pol­i­tics con­ser­vatism via:cshalizi

• BloJJ — About con­fer­ence poster design and defense:

  “My approach is dif­fer­ent. Poster pre­sen­ta­tion, like con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion, belongs more to the area of dra­matic arts than to mar­ket­ing. It is information/​entertainment, and that is the main thing you have to bear in mind when prepar­ing for the ses­sion. Plus, while at a con­fer­ence you have the full atten­tion of your audi­ence (shared, of course, with email, Face­book, plus the 10% that are sim­ply speak­ing) in a poster ses­sion you have to first attract the atten­tion of the peo­ple wan­der­ing around a hall shared with other 20 to 100 posters, then keep them there for the dura­tion of the spiel and while you start a new one, and then, of course, con­vey the infor­ma­tion you want to share with your poster. ”
  
  advice academic-​​culture meet­ing poster-​​presentaitons skills

• Economist’s View: The 999

  “Some Indi­vid­u­als of our Coun­try­men, by the Smiles of Prov­i­dence or some other Means, are enabled to roll in their four–wheel’d Car­riages, and can sup­port the Expence of good Houses, rich Fur­ni­ture, and Lux­u­ri­ous Liv­ing. But, is it equi­table that 99, or rather 999 should suf­fer for the Extrav­a­gance or Grandeur of one? Espe­cially when it is consider’d, that Men fre­quently owe their Wealth to the Impov­er­ish­ment of their Neighbours.”
  
  it-​​was-​​ever-​​thus

• Ris­ingTide­Har­bor: Matt Barcomb’s Blog on Lean Agile Busi­ness Soft­ware Devel­op­ment: Stop B*tching About Local Optimizations

  “In fact, one approach is to inten­tion­ally over opti­mize a local opti­miza­tion. This will often make appar­ent to man­age­ment (or even to you) where the true bot­tle neck in the sys­tem is. We shouldn’t worry so much about doing the wrong things righter, but we should be aware that that may be the case and always work to be doing the right things. In the end, show­ing improve­ment and build­ing momen­tum can lead to excit­ing changes. In fair­ness, it can also come crash­ing to the ground if the right kinds of changes aren’t made at some point, but this should not deter any­one who thinks some­thing can be made bet­ter from try­ing to do so and it cer­tainly should not be a rea­son to do nothing!”
  
  change cultural-​​engineering organizational-​​behavior local-​​optimization

• Geof­frey Chaucer Hath a Blog: A Long Tyme Agoon in a Shire Far Away

  “…A WHINY YOUTHE cam nexte, barl­eye a man, With yelwe haire, tunique, and farmeres tan. But aqua­cul­ture litel did he love, He wolde been a pilot al above And bulls­eye oump-​​rattes yn a nim­ble craft.…”
  
  amus­ing

• knitr: Ele­gant, flex­i­ble and fast dynamic report gen­er­a­tion with R | knitr

  “The knitr pack­age was designed to be a trans­par­ent engine for dynamic report gen­er­a­tion with R, solve some long-​​standing prob­lems in Sweave, and com­bine fea­tures in other add-​​on pack­ages into one pack­age (knitr ≈ Sweave + cacheSweave + pgf­Sweave + weaver + R2HTML::RweaveHTML + highlight::HighlightWeaveLatex + 0.2 * brew + 0.1 * SweaveListingUtils + more).”
  
  R-​​language LaTeX type­set­ting dynamic-​​documents writ­ing tools

• Math Notes | Futil­ity Closet

  kata for GP
  
  nudge-​​targets mathematical-​​recreations

• Cere­bral Mastication

  “There’s a charm­ing lit­tle brain teaser that’s going around the Inter­webs. It’s got var­i­ous forms, but they all look some­thing like this:…”
  
  nudge-​​targets mathematical-​​recreations

• Tanya Khovanova’s Math Blog » Blog Archive » Inter­lock­ing Polyominoes

  “A set of poly­omi­noes is inter­locked if no sub­set can be moved far away from the rest. It was known that poly­omi­noes that are built from four or fewer squares do not inter­lock. The project of Dhawan and his men­tor was to inves­ti­gate the inter­locked­ness of larger poly­omi­noes. And they totally deliv­ered. They quickly proved that you can inter­lock poly­omi­noes with eight or more squares. Then they proved that pen­tomi­noes can’t inter­lock. This left them with a gray area: what hap­pens with poly­omi­noes with six or seven squares? After draw­ing many beau­ti­ful pic­tures, they finally found the struc­ture pre­sented in our accom­pa­ny­ing image. The sys­tem con­sists of 12 hex­omi­noes and 5 pen­tomi­noes, and it is rigid. You can­not move a thing. That means that hex­omi­noes can be inter­locked and thus the gray area was resolved.”
  
  poly­omi­noes mathematical-​​recreations nudge-​​targets

• Pool based evo­lu­tion­ary algo­rithm pre­sented in EvoStar 2012 « GeNeura Team

  “This is the first inter­na­tion­ally pub­lished paper (it was pre­vi­ously pub­lished in a Span­ish con­fer­ence of a series that deals with a sys­tem, intended for vol­un­teer com­put­ing, that uses a pool for imple­ment­ing dis­trib­uted evo­lu­tion­ary algo­rithms. The basic idea is that the pop­u­la­tion resides in a pool (imple­mented using CouchDB), with clients pulling indi­vid­u­als from the pool, doing stuff on them, and putting them back in the pool. The algo­rithm uses, as much as pos­si­ble, CouchDB fea­tures (such as revi­sions and views) to achieve good per­for­mance. All the code (for this and, right now, for the next papers) is avail­able as open-​​source code.”
  
  distributed-​​processing evolutionary-​​algorithms CouchDB nudge

• What Amazon’s ebook strat­egy means — Charlie’s Diary

  “If the major pub­lish­ers switch to sell­ing ebooks with­out DRM, then they can enable cus­tomers to buy books from a vari­ety of out­lets and move away from the walled gar­den of the Kin­dle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less imme­di­ate threat than a gigan­tic multi­na­tional with rev­enue of $48 Bil­lion in 2011 (more than the entire global pub­lish­ing indus­try) that has expressed its inten­tion to “dis­rupt” them, and whose chief exec­u­tive said recently “even well-​​meaning gate­keep­ers slow inno­va­tion” (where “inno­va­tion” is code-​​speak for “oppor­tu­ni­ties for me to turn a profit”). And so they will deep-​​six their exist­ing com­mit­ment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-​​imposed set­tle­ment to wig­gle out of the most-​​favoured-​​nation terms imposed by Ama­zon, in order to sell their wares as widely as pos­si­ble. If they don’t, they’re doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fic­tion get to live in the Ama­zon com­pany town.”
  
  monopoly-​​and-​​monpsony-​​sittin-​​in-​​a-​​tree Ama­zon eBooks disintermediation-​​in-​​action cor­po­ratism redis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion