These are my recent Pin​board​.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 | xPro​gram​ming​.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