Tag Archives: nanohistory

Items of some interest…

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Items of some interest…

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These are my recent Pinboard.in links:

  • Recounting the Dead – NYTimes.com

    "So what? Above a certain count, do the numbers even matter? Well, yes. The difference between the two estimates is large enough to change the way we look at the war. The new estimate suggests that more men died as a result of the Civil War than from all other American wars combined. Approximately 1 in 10 white men of military age in 1860 died from the conflict, a substantial increase from the 1 in 13 implied by the traditional estimate. The death toll is also one of our most important measures of the war’s social and economic costs. A higher death toll, for example, implies that more women were widowed and more children were orphaned as a result of the war than has long been suspected.

    In other words, the war touched more lives and communities more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensuing decades of American history in ways we have not yet fully grasped. True, the war was terrible in either case. But just how terrible, and just how extensive its consequences, can only be known when we have a better count of the Civil War dead."

    history Civil-War morbidity-and-mortality counting

  • Scientific American Blog Network

    'While Adam Smith may be known as the philosopher who first promoted the idea that “greed is good,” his earlier work suggests we are not condemned to exploit others for the benefit of a few. In his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, written in 1759, Smith proposed that sympathy for the plight of those who suffer is an inherent part of human nature.

    “When we see one man oppressed or injured by another,” he wrote, “the sympathy which we feel with the distress of the sufferer seems to serve only to animate our fellow-feeling with his resentment against the offender.”

    With the current occupation of Wall Street and the international condemnation of an economic model that would take advantage of those most in need, we are witnessing Smith’s prediction in action. It is only when the reality of people’s suffering is hidden that greed is allowed to dictate policy. While our current system has chosen the greed of the few over the needs of the many, the intellectual founder of modern capitalism suggests it doesn’t need to be this way. “When we think of the anguish of the sufferers, we take part with them more earnestly against their oppressors.”'

    economics economic-crisis complexology cultural-dynamics

  • Guyot’s speciman sheet | The Collation

    "So who was responsible and when is it from? Since the sheet is neither signed nor dated, we can only make this assertion thanks to the sleuthing done by earlier scholars, most importantly by John Dreyfus for his collection of type specimen facsimiles, and the source of much of the information I give here.1 This sheet can be connected to its type caster thanks to the detailed records kept by the Dutch printer Christophe Plantin and the remarkable longevity of his press, now the home of the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Plantin’s 1575 inventory of fonts includes the double pica italic typeface shown on this sheet (it’s the largest size of the italic face, on the right-hand column), with a note on the facing page identifying it as “Ascendonica Cursive de Guiot.” François Guyot was a type caster in Antwerp who worked from the 1540s until his death in 1570, and who was the main caster for Plantin from 1555 onwards; he also seems to have worked briefly for John Day in London."

    nanohistory typography type-design early-modern

  • Thought You Should See This – Disrupting the Conference Business

    In other words, a standard Open Space:

    "Essentially, it’ll be Wurman and 100 of his pals (and as he so eloquently put it, “I know fucking everybody”) talking about a particular topic for a certain amount of time. The “intellectual jazz” will be filmed in black and white, and then later released as an interactive app. ”I’m terrified,” said a coy Wurman, looking absolutely nothing of the sort. ”I don’t know if I can pull it off.” And while a gathering of 100 bigwigs in some ways sounds like the worst kind of elitist horror show, I actually found myself rooting for him. I mean, the world needs contrarians, and Wurman sure is one of them."

    conference non-fake-Wurman TED meeting ideas

  • nthmost » Blog Archive » Why The Interstate Battery Warranty is Worthless

    "We Can’t Afford to Just Be Consumers Anymore

    In the classical model of economics, a self-interested consumer like Josh would readily accept Interstate’s offer, seeing no downside.

    But Josh is part of a new class of consumers who understand the idea of “voting with your dollar”, and it goes well beyond which brand of toilet paper you bring to the checkout line. There are several immediate downsides to the “resolution” Interstate brought to the table:

    Firestone would be rewarded for their ridiculous 2-hour-minimum policy to change the battery.

    Interstate would continue to be unable to enforce their warranty.

    The customer (Josh) would have no reason to believe he’d be able to get a new battery in the future without all of the nonsense implied by the resolution — namely, paying for the 2 hours of labor himself and then securing reimbursement from Interstate.
    Josh looked at the options and decided not to enable the vendors in their bullying of Interstate, and not to encourage Interstate to bend over for them. And he realized his time in chasing down his due was worth more than the value of the product in question."

    economics consumer-activism lawyers warranty object-lessons-in-contract-law

Items of some interest…

Posted on by

These are my recent Pinboard.in links:

Items of some interest…

Posted on by

These are my recent Pinboard.in links:

  • A second front

    "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

  • Noodlesoft: Hazel FAQ

    "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

  • Our Wasteful Health Care System – NYTimes.com

    "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

  • Let It Roll – CFO Magazine – May 2011 Issue – CFO.com

    "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

  • About That Recipe

    "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

  • Language Log » Straw men and Bee Science

    "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

  • Bozo Sapiens: Robert Owen: Laboriousness

    "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

  • Calculated Risk: The Excess Vacant Housing Supply

    "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-design

  • Time 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

  • Seeing Things On Mars: A Long History of Martian Illusions and Human Delusions |Pareidolia & Optical Illusions | Space.com

    "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't

  • Datameer 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

  • Plan Would Force U. of Wisconsin to Return $39-Million in U.S. Broadband Grants – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    "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

Items of some interest…

Posted on by

These are my recent Pinboard.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? – SignOnSanDiego.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