Everybody is Spamming Everybody Else on MTurk -- one researcher found >40% of HITs are spammy, but this author posted a Mechanical Turk HIT to supply recommendations for visitors to a non-existent French city and got responses from people expecting that every response would be paid regardless of quality.
Javascript Garden -- a growing collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript programming language. It gives advice to avoid common mistakes, subtle bugs, as well as performance issues and bad practices that non-expert JavaScript programmers may encounter on their endeavours into the depths of the language.
A 5 Minute Framework for Fostering Better Conversations in Comments Sections (Poytner) -- Whether online or offline, people act out the most when they don’t see anyone in charge. Next time you see dreck being slung in the bowels of a news story comment thread, see if you can detect whether anyone from the news organization is jumping in and setting the tone. As West put it, news organizations typically create a disconnect between the people who provide content and the people who discuss that content. This inhibits quality conversation.
Full Text RSS Feed -- builds full-text feeds for sites that only offer extracts in their RSS feeds. (via Jason Ryan)

Of Tandoori and Epicuration (JP Rangaswami) -- Curation is the process by which aggregate data is imbued with personalised trust.
Siri -- a personal assistant iPhone app, like IWantSandy but with voice recognition.
Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Institutional Repository -- great lessons for all open data projects. The reward structure established by each discipline largely defines the motivation behind faculty behavior. As eloquently stated by the economist, "While we are going through a digital revolution - in the way we teach and communicate with each other - the reputation of being published in the print journals is still the strongest incentive for motivation." This position was largely echoed by the engineer, who stated "what is holding us to the journal is the promotion procedure. This is about a problem of measurement with how Cornell evaluates my work." That said, there are real risks associated with changing one's practices, especially when one assumes the role of an early innovator. As the communication faculty member summarized, "There has to be a better way than the current system, but I'm not willing to be on the leading edge in using that system." (via JHW)
Google Voice Transcriptions Annotated as Poetry -- found art that reminds us that it's hard to wreck a nice beach.
WHATEVER THIS IS (Caller: My friend Christina)

Hey mister
it's Christina
just left you a message and then
I got your message and realized
you're stuck out

but I'll try you.

But yeah, just trying to be tomorrow
(if you get the chance)
And if you're a few Karen in China the next day
Council lot more
eating minnows on the step
and give me a little

I'll be hanging around then and I am
well,
whatever this is.

Kindle Development Kit APIs -- Amazon will release a Kindle SDK. These are the API docs. (via obra on Twitter)
rePublish -- all-Javascript ebook reader. (via kellan on Twitter)
Peer Review: What's it Good For? (Cameron Neylon) -- harsh and honest review of peer review with some important questions for the future of science. But there is perhaps an even more important procedural issue around peer review. Whatever value it might have we largely throw away. Few journals make referee’s reports available, virtually none track the changes made in response to referee’s comments enabling a reader to make their own judgement as to whether a paper was improved or made worse. Referees get no public credit for good work, and no public opprobrium for poor or even malicious work. And in most cases a paper rejected from one journal starts completely afresh when submitted to a new journal, the work of the previous referees simply thrown out of the window. Some lessons in here for social software, too.
Analog IMDB -- The transition is moving slowly, but it’s moving. It’s a fascinating thing to watch. The technology is the dull part: what’s interesting is the shift in perception. You know how sometimes you turn off a certain section of your brain and force yourself to see a word not as a piece of language with meaning, but as a sequence of black shapes and white spaces? It’s like you’re seeing that image for the very first time and suddenly “bird” seems like a very odd thing. I’ve been buying all of my in-print books electronically for a couple of years. Physical books aren’t weird to me yet. But damn, that old copy of the Maltin guide was a freaky and bizarre object. It’s the first time I looked at a book and didn’t see a container for information. I saw dead wood.

mytop -- a MySQL top implementation to show you why your server is so damn slow right now.
What Could Kill Elegant High-Value Participatory Project? -- The problem was not that the system was buggy or hard to use, but that it disrupted staff expectations and behavior. It introduced new challenges for staff [...]. Rather than adapt to these challenges, they removed the system. [...] No librarian would get rid of all the Harry Potter books because they are "too popular." No museum would stop offering an educational program that was "too successful." These are familiar challenges that come with the job and are seen to have benefit. But if tagging creates a line or people spend too much time giving you feedback? Staff at Haarlem Oost likely felt comfortable removing the tagging shelves because they didn't see the tagging as a patron requirement, nor the maintenance of the shelves as part of their job.
Gremlin -- a Turing-complete, graph-based programming language developed in Java 1.6+ for key/value-pair multi-relational graphs known as property graphs. Graph structures underly a lot of interesting data (citations, social networks, maps) and this is a sign that we're inching towards better systems for working with those graphs. (via Hacker News)
Anic -- programming language based on stream and latches. I still can't figure out whether it's an elaborate April Fool's Day joke that was released too soon, because the claim of "easier than *sh" is a bold one given the double-backslash and double-square-bracket-heavy syntax of the language. Important because it's built to be parallelised, and we're in transition pain right now between well-understood predictable languages for single CPUs (with hacks like pthreads for scaling) and experimental languages for multiple CPUs.