These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
- “Increasingly, this seems to be a war for survival. I understand that traditional publishers are getting more and more desperate as the digital revolution proceeds and they continue to dither about how to address it. But academic faculty members are the source of almost all the content these publishers publish, so this behavior is an extreme example of biting the hand that feeds them. It is even more stupid, in my opinion, than the strategy of recording industry who is suing its own customers, because these publishers are attacking a group that is both their customers and those who supply them with a product in the first place.”
copyright academic-culture libraries good-eating-on-one-of-those disintermediation-targets jQuery for Absolute Beginners: The Complete Series | Nettuts+
“Hi everyone! Today, I posted the final screencast in my “jQuery for Absolute Beginners” series on the ThemeForest Blog. If you’re unfamiliar – over the course of about a month, I posted fifteen video tutorials that teach you EXACTLY how to use the jQuery library. We start by downloading the library and eventually work our way up to creating an AJAX style-switcher. I’m very proud of this series; possibly more than any other that I’ve done for Envato.”
javascript jQuery tutorial podcast video- “In general, Hazel can monitor any folder but keep in mind that certain folders may not be good candidates. For instance, P2P and other apps that might download a file slowly, may have their files moved before they are completely downloaded. In cases like this, it is best if the program has an option to download to one folder then move them automatically to another (Transmission has such an option). This second folder is the one you should have Hazel monitor. Hazel does have special support for Safari, Camino, Firefox, Mail and Speed Download and knows how to identify when their downloads are complete. We will be adding support for more apps as time goes on so if you have a favorite app of yours you would like supported, please let us know and we’ll look into adding support.”
utilities MacOS power-user sysadmin Kate Oneal and the Mythical Italian Restaurant | xProgramming.com
‘“The artist suggested this: ‘Let’s set a deadline and total budget. I’ll keep you posted on how much is being spent, and of course we’ll have the picture on the wall to look at. By the time we’re about half-way through, it should be of high enough quality, and have enough picture elements, that we could stop any time. You’ll have more ideas, of course, but by then we’ll both have a sense of how fast we can progress, and you can choose the most valuable things to add or change. You’ll have total control over how the picture winds up, and if you want to, we can stop on or before the money runs out.’ “Guido wasn’t entirely convinced. He wanted to know how he could be sure he wouldn’t be left with a horribly ugly wall. The artist told him that she would guarantee to paint it back over and stop any time he wanted, and said she would start by working in some temporary pigment like chalk, so they could erase and change things easily.’
project-management metaphor agile-management- “The other key thing to pay attention to is who this marketing campaign was targeted at: key decisionmakers at providers and insurance companies. Those are the people who decide whether medical procedures get ordered. It’s not patients. Patients aren’t going to experience a loss of freedom or satisfaction because an expert reviewer at the Independant Payment Advisory Board makes the call as to whether a procedure is medically beneficial, rather than the corresponding bureaucrat at their insurance provider or at the for-profit clinic they’re attending.”
medical-culture corporatism public-policy insurance healthcare marketing The Value of Following Passion in a Jobless World — Lane Wallace — Life — The Atlantic
“If I were a 22-year-old reading all this, the whole notion of adulthood would seem like a prison sentence worth trying to avoid. But more importantly, the entire premise upon which all this advice is based is false. Passion, despite how often we use the term to tout company commitment or extol romantic excitement, is often misunderstood or confused with other motivations. Many people view dreams and passion exactly as Brooks painted it: as a hopelessly idealistic, selfish, or irresponsible choice that is diametrically opposed to commitment to others, responsibility, security, or success. But I have spent the past year and a half researching a book about passion and people who follow passionate paths in life, and nothing I’ve found backs up that premise or belief. Indeed, I would argue that passion is one of the most important elements in any effort to improve a community, build something of value in the world, and even survive tough times or a daunting economy. The fact that it also tends to lead to a sense of fulfillment within an individual is certainly one of its benefits—but it’s not the driving force that compels someone down the passion road.”
worklife motivation David-Brooks-doesn’t-deserve-a-lot-of-respect passion- “Separating the three decisions has enabled the company to set targets that are more ambitious, intelligent, and motivating, says Bogsnes. As a result, the forecasts are less biased, and resource allocation is more dynamic and self-regulating. “The ‘bank’ is open 12 months a year, not just six weeks in the fall,” he says. “By making resource decisions as late as possible instead of in an annual budget, we have better information — not just about project attractiveness but also about our capacity to fund or man new projects.“ Encouraged by positive results from abandoning the budget, Statoil recently decided to abolish the calendar year as a planning tool and introduce a business– and event-driven management process in its stead.”
budgeting finance management planning forecasting agility - “Interpreters are couplers. They enable the two people, groups, or cultures to understand each other because they understand both. While the methods mentioned above can facilitate a further understanding of past food cultures, what about the other part of the connection—between people today and in the future? The historical interpreter has the unusual task of coupling people in one group about which she can only know a part, one group she knows well, and, if she publishes her interpretation in any form, one group in the future, about which she cannot know. The question is, then, not only what can we learn about meanings in the past, but how can we interpret those meanings to people today and in the future?”
quotable history - “Let me start by saying that there’s a way to take all this that makes it entirely correct. The key motive of science is explanation, and it’s often essential to abstract away from the complexities of raw observation, and so on. I took courses from Chomsky as an undergraduate and a graduate student, and I’m grateful for what I learned from him, and for the eminently fair way that he always treated me. But increasingly, it seems to me, he has been elevating his personal distaste for the complexities of the real world into a systematic philosophy. To the extent that others accept these views, it excludes them from participation in (what I think are) the most promising and exciting current directions in the sciences of speech and language.”
Noam-Chomsky theory-and-practice-sitting-in-a-tree bias science learning-from-data - “Owen had neglected to notice that expectations also change through circumstance. As our communal conditions advance, we all tend to want to become the prophet, not merely the congregation. Once the problem of survival is solved, it’s no longer enough not to be starving or abused or overworked – we want personal satisfaction and self-direction. So, yes: some of the great names in business – the Lowell mills, Hershey’s, Cadbury’s, Lever Brothers, Google – applied dilute Owenism to great effect, but success makes employees become more individualist and ask for more of their reward in cash, while hard times make shareholders less generous, pointing out that plenty of people would take the job without the crêche, lecture series, or company brass band. Shifting expectation drives the carousel for another turn; we remain ambivalent about work, this thing we do through most of our waking lives, because we still don’t know what it is for.”
institutional-design collaboration workantile-exchange diversity plan-for-change - “It is no surprise that Florida has the largest number of excess vacant units and that Nevada has the largest percentage of excess vacant units. What might be a surprise to some is that California is below the U.S. average.”
financial-crisis real-estate housing-bubble public-policy Stringent Response: Systems biology approach to stringent response
“All this results in bacteria gambling all the time: some react to stimulus, some don’t, some produce more proteins in response to it, some less. This leads to so called phenotypic heterogeneity, when otherwise (genetically) identical bacteria become very different in terms of their responses. This could be a good thing and also could be a bad thing. Having a collection of different bugs instead of a clone army will provide certain versatility: some are ready for one conditions, and some are ready for others. For instance, some are ready to grow and divide right away and some are slower and more cautious. Both types of cells can be beneficial in different conditions: the active ones will drive the population growth, but will be sensitive to the antibiotic treatment, and the passive ones will wait until the treatment is over and then they will come to life. Sounds like a good strategy (and it has a name, this strategy — “bed hedging”) and I guess it is exactly the reason why clone armies never caught on.”
diversity systems-biology evolutionary-biology game-theory emergent-designTime as a Competitive Advantage | Mike Cohn’s Blog — Succeeding With Agile®
“Innovation has become a fertile area in which companies seek competitive advantage today. This has served Apple well over the past decade. I don’t think innovativeness will be going away soon as a source of competitive advantage. But I do wonder whether time is running out on time as a competitive advantage. If agile and other innovations lead us to a world where all companies can deliver new products and services equally quickly, companies will need to find newer ways to differentiate themselves.”
innovation competitiveness agility strategy- “Humans have been seeing strange things on the surface of Mars for centuries. From the 1700s up through the present day, widespread fame has been available to anyone able to produce even the slightest bit of flimsy evidence that there’s Martian life.”
nanohistory Mars psychoceramics astronomy belief optical-illusions The rise of Glencore, the biggest company you’ve never heard of | Business | The Guardian
“But so jealously has Glasenberg guarded his privacy that his name means nothing to the man on the street. For years he has avoided speeches and, until recently, had given only one interview – to his old university magazine. If you live outside the world of commodities trading or corporate finance, Ivan Glasenberg is probably the Most Important Businessman You Have Never Heard Of.”
globalization finance corporations privacy transparency-it-ain’tDatameer snags $9.25M more to analyze massive amounts of data | VentureBeat
“Datameer, a company that allows users to analyze massive amounts of data without technical know-how, today announced a second round of funding for $9.25 million. The money will be used to hire additional employees for its engineering, sales, and marketing teams.”
data-analysis data-mining startups funding bubblicious- “Another provision in the plan would bar any University of Wisconsin campus from participating in advanced networks connecting research institutions worldwide, according to Mr. Evers’s memo. For example, the Madison campus would have to withdraw from Internet2, a high-speed networking consortium, said Mr. Giroux.”
politics Wisconsin stupidity broadband telecommunications corporatism