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

• The Lab­o­ra­to­rium : Cato Ver­sus Caesar

  “I could not tell you how many times I’ve encoun­tered lib­er­tar­ian argu­ments about law that assume that indi­vid­u­als can and ought to use con­tracts to pro­tect them­selves against just this sort of con­tin­gency. Don’t worry about users click­ing “I agree” to over­reach­ing terms of ser­vice; if they truly cared about the terms, they’d nego­ti­ate for bet­ter ones. Don’t worry about peo­ple who refuse to buy health insur­ance; they’re mak­ing a ratio­nal choice for them­selves. Don’t worry about minor­ity share­hold­ers, don’t worry about fran­chisees, don’t worry about all the other groups that find them­selves on the wrong end of a bar­gain that always seems to tip against them in the long run—if they wanted bet­ter pro­tec­tions, they could and should have nego­ti­ated for them up front. Except they don’t. They never do. And really. If the uber-​​libertarians of the Cato insti­tute can’t watch out for them­selves, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
  
  like-​​civilization-​​libertarianism-​​would-​​be-​​a-​​good-​​idea lib­er­tar­i­an­ism pol­i­tics pawns-​​being-​​pawned ratio­nal­ity pragmatism-it-ain’t

• Work­ing Invig­o­rated Under an LED Sky Ceiling

  “A pre­lim­i­nary study has show this dynamic light­ing is pleas­antly per­ceived. A group of vol­un­teers con­ducted office duties for four days sub­jected to light from a 30 by 60 cm ceil­ing dis­play. On the first day the light was sta­tic, on the sec­ond it fluc­tu­ated gen­tly, and on the third the changes in light­ing con­di­tions were more rapid. On the final day, the major­ity of vol­un­teers (80 per­cent) said they wished to con­tinue work­ing with the rapidly fluc­tu­at­ing light.”
  
  WANT interior-​​design light­ing work­place

• » An effi­cient jour­nal The Occa­sional Pamphlet

  “Nonethe­less, the suc­cess of JMLR does pro­vide a clue that the cost of run­ning a pre­mier jour­nal might be far less than pub­lish­ers imply, if they were to rethink the process sub­stan­tially — maybe not $10 per arti­cle, but surely far less than the $5,000 aver­age rev­enue per arti­cle that schol­arly pub­lish­ers cur­rently receive. This expec­ta­tion is borne out by the sev­eral non-​​profit and com­mer­cial open-​​access jour­nal pub­lish­ers that are able to oper­ate in the black with pub­li­ca­tion fees a frac­tion of that average.”
  
  disintermediation-​​in-​​action academic-​​culture pub­lish­ing there’s-good-eatin-on-one-a-those

• lan​guage​hat​.com: THERE ARE NO GZ’HURS.

  
  phi­los­o­phy poetry very-​​good-​​writing

• Pale­olithic Park « It Takes 30

  “Per­haps not quite as excit­ing as reviv­i­fied dinosaurs, but still amaz­ing: plants from the late Pale­olithic era are claimed to have been regen­er­ated from fos­sil mate­r­ial (Yashina et al. 2012. Regen­er­a­tion of whole fer­tile plants from 30,000-y-old fruit tis­sue buried in Siber­ian per­mafrost.  PNAS doi:10.10.73/pnas.1118386109).  This has very lit­tle to do with sys­tems biol­ogy, but I was inter­ested and thought you would be too.  Per­haps I could trace some kind of con­nec­tion (did you know that our Artist-​​no-​​longer-​​in-​​Residence, Brian Knep, shared two Acad­emy Awards for his work on the movie Juras­sic Park?) but it would be forced and hardly worth it.  Bet­ter to admit to mild frivolity.”
  
  tissue-​​culture pale­o­bi­ol­ogy experimental-​​science biol­ogy

• zen​pun​dit​.com » Blog Archive » The Era of the Creepy-​​State is Here

  “Two neb­bish Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, one Repub­li­can and one Demo­c­rat, dis­tin­guished only by their lack of leg­isla­tive or polit­i­cal impor­tance, spon­sored the bill on behalf of the big boys who fast-​​tracked it under the radar (they learned from the SOPA deba­cle). For­get ide­ol­ogy or boasts about car­ry­ing a copy of the Con­sti­tu­tion in the breast pocket of their suit, whether you are in an arch­con­ser­v­a­tive Con­gres­sional dis­trict or an ultra­l­ib­eral one, almost every mem­ber of Con­gress voted “aye” to trash mul­ti­ple amend­ments in the Bill of Rights. Almost every one. This is an accel­er­at­ing trend in recent years and in par­tic­u­lar, a bipar­ti­san theme of the 112^th Con­gress, which views Con­sti­tu­tional rights of nobod­ies as an anachro­nis­tic hin­drance to the inter­ests (or con­ve­nience) of their pow­er­ful and wealthy polit­i­cal sup­port­ers. Our elected offi­cials and their back­ers increas­ingly share an oli­garchic class inter­est that in impor­tant mat­ters, trumps the Kabuki par­ti­san­ship of  FOXnews and MSNBC and incul­cates a tech­no­cratic admi­ra­tion for the “effi­ciency” of select police states.”
  
  and-​​away-​​we-​​go fas­cism disintermediation-​​targets

• The Sun is Set­ting on Rails-​​style MVC Frame­works « caines​.ca/​b​log

  “Lately I’ve been think­ing a lot about the impact of the move to a thick client archi­tec­ture for web appli­ca­tions, and I’m becom­ing more and more cer­tain that this means that Rails-​​style MVC frame­works on the server-​​side are going to end up being phased out in favour of leaner and meaner frame­works that bet­ter address the new needs of thick-​​client architecture.”
  
  software-​​development archi­tec­ture project-​​structure design-​​patterns client-​​side-​​processing

• The Search for a New Busi­ness Model | Project for Excel­lence in Jour­nal­ism (PEJ)

  “The indus­try is inhib­ited by sev­eral obsta­cles that exec­u­tives them­selves can­didly acknowl­edge. One involves the dif­fi­culty of chang­ing the behav­ior of peo­ple trained in the ways of a mature and monop­o­lis­tic indus­try. Still another is the unavoid­able fact that the part of the news­pa­per indus­try that is grow­ing, dig­i­tal, con­tin­ues to pro­vide only a small part of the rev­enue, while the part that is shrink­ing, print, pro­vides most of the money-​​a para­dox that is dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate and hard to resist. One per­va­sive feel­ing is that 15 years into the dig­i­tal tran­si­tion, exec­u­tives still feel they are in the early stages of fig­ur­ing out a how to proceed.”
  
  jour­nal­ism disintermediation-​​in-​​action business-​​culture monop­oly can-​​we-​​build-​​a-​​wall-​​with-​​bricks-​​and-​​mortar?

• [1111.3304] Eigen­vec­tor Syn­chro­niza­tion, Graph Rigid­ity and the Mol­e­cule Problem

  “The graph real­iza­tion prob­lem has received a great deal of atten­tion in recent years, due to its impor­tance in appli­ca­tions such as wire­less sen­sor net­works and struc­tural biology.…”
  
  algo­rithms sta­tis­tics struc­ture learning-​​from-​​data nudge-​​targets

• Seth’s Blog: www​.stop​steal​ing​dreams​.com is ready to read and share

  “My read­ers ask me that ques­tion more than just about any other. So here’s my ques­tion back: What is school for? (Click the link to get to the free down­load). I’ve just pub­lished a 30,000 word man­i­festo, totally free to read, share, trans­late, print and, most of all, use to start an essen­tial con­ver­sa­tion. It took a lot to get it to you, and I’m encour­ag­ing you to take a few min­utes to check it out. After you read it, per­haps you’ll write one of your own.”
  
  edu­ca­tion academia-doesn’t-guarantee-acuity disintermediation-​​in-​​action cultural-​​assumptions

• [1003.5956] Unbi­ased Offline Eval­u­a­tion of Contextual-​​bandit-​​based News Arti­cle Rec­om­men­da­tion Algorithms

  “…In this paper, we intro­duce a replay method– ology for con­tex­tual ban­dit algo­rithm eval­u­a­tion. Dif­fer­ent from simulator-​​based approaches, our method is com­pletely data-​​driven and very easy to adapt to dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions. More impor­tantly, our method can pro­vide prov­ably unbi– ased eval­u­a­tions. Our empir­i­cal results on a large-​​scale news arti­cle rec­om­men­da­tion dataset col­lected from Yahoo! Front Page con­form well with our the­o­ret­i­cal results. Fur­ther­more, com­par­isons between our offline replay and online bucket eval­u­a­tion of sev­eral con­tex­tual ban­dit algo­rithms show ac– curacy and effec­tive­ness of our offline eval­u­a­tion method.”
  
  clas­si­fi­ca­tion rec­om­men­da­tions algo­rithms machine-​​learning crowd­sourc­ing nudge-​​targets sta­tis­tics

• Look­ing For Income? Try High-​​Yield Muni ETFs — Seek­ing Alpha

  “In terms of hold­ings, the fund has a heavy focus on health care (41.7%) and indus­trial rev­enue (28.3%) bonds which com­prise the lion’s share of the assets. State expo­sure is also pretty spread out as Cal­i­for­nia bonds com­prise about 18.3% of the fund while New York bonds are another 11.1%. Beyond these two, the rest of the top five is rounded out by the ter­ri­tory of Puerto Rico (8.5%), and then the states of New Jer­sey (7.6%) and Ohio (6.9%). Matu­rity lev­els are tilted towards the longer end of the curve giv­ing the fund a greater focus on yield but also on inter­est rate risk as well. Thanks to this, the fund pays out a 30 Day SEC Yield of 5.55%, a level that trans­fers over to 8.5% in tax equiv­a­lent terms for those in the top tax bracket.”
  
  invest­ment ETFs municipal-​​bonds finance

• Visu­al­iza­tion series: Insight from Cleve­land and Tufte on plot­ting numeric data by groups | Solomon Messing

  “A good visu­al­iza­tion con­veys key infor­ma­tion to those who may have trou­ble inter­pret­ing num­bers and/​or sta­tis­tics, which can make your find­ings acces­si­ble to a wider audi­ence (more on this below).  Visu­al­iza­tions also give your audi­ence a break from lex­i­cal pro­cess­ing, which is espe­cially use­ful when you are pre­sent­ing your findings–people can lis­ten to you and process the find­ings from a well-​​designed visual at the same time, but most peo­ple have trou­ble lis­ten­ing while read­ing your Pow­er­Point bul­let points.  Visu­al­iza­tions also con­vey key infor­ma­tion embed­ded in mas­sive amounts of data, which can aid your own exploratory analy­sis of data, no mat­ter how massive.”
  
  visu­al­iza­tion data-​​analysis com­mu­ni­ca­tion graphic-​​design argu­men­ta­tion sta­tis­tics ggplot2

• Crop cir­cles found in the snow

  “These enor­mous, intri­cate designs are the cre­ation of one man and his snow­shoes. Simon Beck, whom you can see in the last image below, con­ceives and exe­cutes these pat­terns, turn­ing fresh snow into alien messages.”
  
  crop-​​circles art land­scape conceptual-​​art wow

• How Pho­to­shop Makes us all Paranoid

  “The debate is an old one. New how­ever is the ease – though, I can assure you, edit­ing away objects in Pho­to­shop in a clean way is far from easy – and the extend in which manip­u­la­tion can be done today. Magic Wand-​​ing, cloning and gauss­ian blur are now part even of the vocab­u­lar­ies of a grow­ing num­ber of retirees with too much spare time and an inter­est in pho­tog­ra­phy. The expec­ta­tion that a beau­ti­ful images ‘has to be manip­u­lated’ is so ingrained that we don’t even pause to ques­tion our own para­noia. But, rather than both­er­ing our­selves with the ques­tion if an image is 100% ‘true’ – some­thing that, in my own opin­ion will never be – we should ask our­selves if adap­ta­tions (not ‘manip­u­la­tion’) are rea­son­able; if they add or remove some­thing essen­tial to the image. Eras­ing some zits from a model’s face is per­fectly rea­son­able. Mak­ing eyes a lit­tle brighter can be legit­i­mate. Blow­ing up boobs, length­en­ing legs and shrink­ing waists is not. Ethics sur­round­ing photo-​​manipulation is never so sim­ple as a yes or no ques­tion and is not even a ‘thin line’; it is a mine-​​field in a no man’s land. That careers can be scut­tled be being ‘caught’ doing so is sad, in par­tic­u­lar because in the trench war between ‘dig­i­tal com­pos­i­tors’ and photo-​​purists, there appears to be lit­tle will­ing­ness to come to a mid­dle ground.”
  
  pho­tog­ra­phy art cultural-​​dynamics pragmatism-it-ain’t pho­to­shop authenticity-​​is-​​always-​​fake