These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
Is Your Boss Really in Business to Create Jobs? » New Deal 2.0
“No, Mr. President, we’re not in this together with corporate America. Corporations are in it to maximize profits and boost CEO salaries, not help the U.S. economy or put people back to work. With no “healthy increase in demand,” on the horizon and unemployment heading back up, the President has talked more about government-led solutions that would actually create jobs in America. Near the end of his address on Afghanistan, and in a full-throated pitch at a Democratic fundraiser in New York City the next evening, Obama called for investments in education, infrastructure, and clean energy at home. Democratic leaders in Congress have also started to sharpen their focus on the failure of corporations to create jobs at home. Nancy Pelosi’s reaction to the Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s walking away from budget talks was, “”Yes, we do want to remove tax subsidies for big oil, we want to remove tax breaks for corporations that send jobs overseas… ””Git API v3 | developer.github.com
The Git Database API gives you access to read and write raw Git objects to your Git database on GitHub and to list and update your references (branch heads and tags). This basically allows you to reimplement a lot of Git functionality over our API — by creating raw objects directly into the database and updating branch references you could technically do just about anything that Git can do without having Git installed.These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
Is Your Boss Really in Business to Create Jobs? » New Deal 2.0
“No, Mr. President, we’re not in this together with corporate America. Corporations are in it to maximize profits and boost CEO salaries, not help the U.S. economy or put people back to work. With no “healthy increase in demand,” on the horizon and unemployment heading back up, the President has talked more about government-led solutions that would actually create jobs in America. Near the end of his address on Afghanistan, and in a full-throated pitch at a Democratic fundraiser in New York City the next evening, Obama called for investments in education, infrastructure, and clean energy at home. Democratic leaders in Congress have also started to sharpen their focus on the failure of corporations to create jobs at home. Nancy Pelosi’s reaction to the Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s walking away from budget talks was, “”Yes, we do want to remove tax subsidies for big oil, we want to remove tax breaks for corporations that send jobs overseas… ””Git API v3 | developer.github.com
The Git Database API gives you access to read and write raw Git objects to your Git database on GitHub and to list and update your references (branch heads and tags). This basically allows you to reimplement a lot of Git functionality over our API — by creating raw objects directly into the database and updating branch references you could technically do just about anything that Git can do without having Git installed.These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
QR Codes, more than you want to know. | Tri Win
“Warning: I am a designer by trade so I may get a little over excited about this bit. You do not have to slap an ugly QR Code on well designed media. QR Codes are just now going main stream so they tend to be the focus of the media they are included in. Big black and white squares positioned right in your face. For now this makes sense since the marketers using them tend to need to educate their audience on what they are and how to use them. As they become more common they will become something people will look for, like a web address, allowing designers to integrate functional QR art seamlessly with their design. Just because they are traditionally black and white does not mean they should be. QR codes: • Can be any color • Can be any modular material • Must have at least 55% contrast between the foreground and the background • Should have a margin or “quiet space” of 4 units • Need to have clear detection patterns in the corner • Can have up to 30% of the code obscured if you use the highest error correction • Can be read with any orientation • Can put it in perspective • Can be anamorphic (widescreen) • Can have the cell shape distorted • Can have the interior made of circle or other shapes • can have the design reversed.”Best Illusion of the Year Contest
“The Best Visual illusion of the Year Contest is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of the world’s premier visual illusion research community. Contestants from all around the world submitted novel visual illusions (unpublished, or published no earlier than 2009), and an international panel of judges rated them and narrowed them to the TOP TEN. At the Contest Gala in the Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts, the top ten illusionists presented their creations and the attendees of the event voted to pick the TOP THREE WINNERS!”Things I love about Founder’s Co-op and Our Makeshift Receptionist — A Sack of Seattle
“One interesting phenomenon is that some of the best seats in the house (near the windows, plenty of natural light, good access to the bathroom and kitchen) are avoided like the plague because they’re too near the front entrance. Nobody wants to be mistaken for the receptionist. (Which we don’t have.) With 22 companies, 5 conference rooms, and a speakeasy throughout our 2 floors, guests need to be pointed in the right direction. The problem is that on busy days that could easily mean 15+ interruptions…not ideal for productivity.”Paul Ryan, Republicans, And Generational Politics | The New Republic
“The Ryan plan, in other words, delivers to the older generation exactly what they’ve had all their lives—secure and predictable benefits—and to the next generation, more of what they’ve known—insecurity and risk. It’s hardly the first generational fight the GOP has started. The previous one was just last fall, when they campaigned for Medicare, and against the $500 billion in cuts (mostly by getting rid of the overgenerous subsidies to private insurers in an experimental program) passed as part of the Affordable Care Act. With an off-year electorate that was overwhelmingly older, they could put all their bets on the older side, knowing that seniors would see little benefit from the Affordable Care Act and were naturally worried about any change to the health system they enjoyed.”The War on Sharing [Infographic] — ReadWriteCloud
“With Box, the customers are businesses for the most part. That is a key difference to other challenges by the RIAA. And It sets up a conflict between service providers and their clients who now face a determined media industry with a historic interest in litigation to protect its copyrights.”Slowing down matrix multiplication in R | (R news & tutorials)
“The main source of this speed penalty is an insistence that the result of a matrix multiply should follow R’s rules for handling infinity, NaN (not-a-number), and NA. These rules correspond to what happens with ordinary arithmetic operations on modern computers, which follow a standard for floating-point arithmetic in which, for example, 0⁄0 is NaN. You might therefore think that nothing special is needed to arrange for matrix multiplies to produce NaNs as required. However, R does matrix multiplications using the BLAS library, which comes in many versions, some of which may try to speed things up by avoiding “unnecessary” operations such as multiplication by zero — assuming that that will always result in zero. However, zero times NaN or infinity is supposed to be NaN, not zero.”Taibbi: “US Politics – Reality Show Sponsored by Wall Street” « naked capitalism
“Taibbi discusses the lack of financial reform and failure to prosecute Wall Street…”digital digs: digital authorship, computers and writing #cwcon
“What should be amazingingly clear is that books–trade publishers, self-publishers, ebooks, etc–are doing fine, but scholarly books are bankrupt. The old style academic blogs that many of my colleagues used to keep may be fading but blogging is shifting and proliferating. Writing is alive and growing. I imagine it has little concern for the humans that hitch a ride to it. Stop trying to save the monograph and instead try to answer the question that the monograph was originally developed to answer: how can I communicate with the world?”BBC News — Egyptian pyramids found by infra-red satellite images
“More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings.”Raghuram Rajan on Delineating the Role of Government « naked capitalism
“In this interview, Rajan, who famously told Greenspan at his last Jackson Hole conference that recent changes in financial services industry policy had increased risk, takes on the question of the role of government. He contends that economists have neglected this issue due to overspecialization.”The Return of the Phantom Time Menace « Easily Distracted
“In many ways, this intensified recurrence may be something we can learn from rather than worry about. I think it’s sociologically interesting when or if readers have the same reaction to these kinds of fringe stories as they recur and recirculate. It tells us something about where such stories exist in larger productions of knowledge and information, that we have a firmly marked off niche for “well, that’s nuts but non-offensively so”. The story makes no lasting impression on us, we don’t learn it or incorporate it, it doesn’t challenge us, but we also have a continuing expectation that these stories will continue to be with us and continue to be of interest to us. We’re not repelled by them, not transformed by them, we expect them and find them momentarily intriguing.”“Big Memory” Company Terracotta Snapped Up by Europe’s Fourth Largest Software Company
“In-memory is a hot topic right now, thanks in part to SAP pushing its in-memory analytics platform HANA at Sapphire last week. HANA, however, is not a direct competitor to BigMemory. According to RedMonk co-founder James Governor, competitors include Oracle Coherence, IBM eXtreme Scale, Hazelcast and Gigaspaces. “Indeed distributed cache is well known enough to be seen as a ‘competitor’ to NoSQL approaches,” Governor wrote. “Both take load off the database — less database work generally means greater scalability””A Strong Dollar Isn’t Always a Good Thing — Economic View — NYTimes.com
“In practice, all that “the exchange rate is the purview of the Treasury” means is that no official other the Treasury secretary is supposed to talk about it (and even he isn’t supposed to say very much). That strikes me as a shame. Perhaps if government officials could talk about the exchange rate forthrightly, there would be more understanding of the issues and more rational policy discussions. Such discussions would start with some basic economics. The desire to trade with other countries or invest in them is what gives rise to the market for foreign exchange. You need euros to travel in Spain or to buy a German government bond, so you need a way to exchange currencies.”Jeff Dean’s Ruby Blog — Form-backing objects for fun and profit
“Form-backing objects, also known as Presenters (not to be confused with the concept of view presenters), are objects whose sole purpose is to take user-entered form data and perform some unit of work. Creating and testing form-backing objects is simple. In this situation, you might add a Registration object.”The distribution of interestingness | (R news & tutorials)
“The longer – and far less satisfying – answer to the question of how interestingness measures should be distributed is, “it depends,” as the following discussion illustrates.”[1105.3363] Active motion assisted by correlated stochastic torques
“The stochastic dynamics of an active particle undergoing a constant speed and additionally driven by an overall fluctuating torque is investigated.…”These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
Economist’s View: Labor Market Policy in the Great Recession
“The positive lesson for the US is that we have a lot of scope to give employers incentives to cut hours rather than jobs, including improving and expanding “work-sharing” (part-time unemployment benefit) programs as well as implementing new direct tax credits to firms that expand paid time off (paid sick days, paid family leave, paid vacations, and other measures). The negative lesson is that focusing on supply-side issues such as training, education, and improved job-matching for the unemployed –as much sense as they make in the long run– is not likely to get us very far when the economy is at 9 percent unemployment. Denmark does far more than we could ever hope to accomplish along these lines and the unemployment there almost doubled between 2007 and 2010.”Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation — Open Book Publishers
“This is a rich and engaging work of outstanding scholarship. Scholars in sociolinguistics, literature, and folklore will recognize the importance of the book for their fields. General readers will find it just plain interesting”Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values
“Here are five to start us off: Like: Twitter / Don’t like: Facebook. The first thing we have to mention, which we have mentioned a few times already, is Twitter. The reasons we like Twitter are complex and I won’t pretend to understand them all, but I’ll throw out a few suggestions. First, its “follow” rather than “friend” model is more open, allows for the collaboration and non-hierarchy that the Internet and digital humanities values. Second, and related to this, Twitter is the place where content-creators—journalists, writers, artists, web developers, etc.—tend to hang out. We overlap with those communities, or at least seek to overlap with them, in productive ways. They are the distant nodes from which we hope new innovations will come. Third, Twitter, in the way we use it, is mostly about sharing ideas whereas Facebook is about sharing relationships. Scholars are good at ideas, maybe less so at relationships. Like: Agile development / Dislike: long planning cycles. The second thing I’ll mention is agile development, the philosophy of “releasing early and often,” which we do not only with software/code but also with our ideas and writing when we Tweet, blog, and chat. We do this as good neighbors but also in the hope that releasing our code and ideas will improve with contributions from end points of our networks. Like: DIY / Dislike: Outsourcing. Most of the most successful digital humanities projects are those done by scholar/technologists not those imagined by scholars and implemented by technologists. Likewise, the most successful digital humanists are scholars who know the technology, often those who are self-taught, not ones who seek a client-vendor relationship with technologists. We take this insight to heart in our hiring at CHNM, looking for people with formal training in the humanities and self-taught tech skills. Like: PHP / Dislike: C++. Fourth, and following from the last point, we like PHP not C++. This is another way of saying we like the transparent, easy-to-learn, and simple (if sometimes ham-handed) technologies of the Web more than the more powerful, more sophisticated, more elegant, but less approachable compiled code of the desktop. A focus on getting the most out of simple, transparent, vernacular technologies allows us to keep the door to the field open to new entrants. Like: Extramural funding / Dislike: Intramural funding. In one respect, this may seem obvious: everybody likes grants. In another respect it’s probably going a little too far to say we don’t like intramural funding: it is essential to building and maintaining capacity for our centers and staff. But it seems to me the most successful digital humanities projects are those that result from competitive grant making processes, especially the federal grant making process. Why is this? I can point to at least three reasons: 1) Attracting grant money keeps us innovating, which, like it or not, is a premium in our business. Grants are given for new work, not for more of the same. 2) Writing grants and serving on panels keep us in conversation with the field. We have to keep current and keep in touch with one another to justify our projects to grantmakers and to recommend others’ projects for funding. Increasingly, funding guidelines themselves require collaboration. 3) Unlike much traditional scholarship, which often requires one big deliverable (a book) after years of close-kept study, research, and writing, grant work requires defining and meeting a set of closely timed, concrete deliverables, a mode of work which encourages the kind of agile development so valued by the Internet and digital humanities community.”Pirate Bay Heads Norwegian Domain Blocking List | TorrentFreak
“The spread of anti-filesharing measures across the United States and Europe appears to be accelerating at a somewhat dizzying pace. On an almost daily basis during the last few months stories about controversial and sometimes draconian measures to deal with online infringement have hit the headlines. Say what you like about the big movie and music studios – they certainly know how to coordinate their lobbying to perfection. Timing like this, with legislation being mulled in many major markets simultaneously, sends a powerful message.”