from NSW

If you've got a major-brand camera with a built-in GPS, don't plan on taking any geotagged photos in China. Chinese law prohibits mapmaking without a license, and most of the large camera manufacturers have complied with this regulation by quietly slipping a censorship function into the GPS -- when you take a picture, the camera checks to see if it's presently in China, and if it is, it throws away its GPS data, rather than embedding it in the photo's metadata.

massive pile of #s around mental, social, app clutter

science in a simple diagrammed nutshell

But alas, the 48,342 people that visited my site resulted in an additional 23 e-comics sales compared to the previous day. So about 0.048% of the extra visitors made a purchase.

a 66 year old man in bed with a 17 year old woman? not at all icky, oh no.

cf horowitz's "mbas are underpriced"
Indeed, the vibe, in the words of a former employee, is of an Apple that is becoming "far more traditional," meaning more MBAs, more process, and more structure. (In point of fact, 2,153 Apple employees reference the term "MBA" in their LinkedIn profiles out of a nonretail workforce of nearly 28,000. More than half the employees who reference "MBA" have been at Apple less than two years.)

Contacted for comment, David Temkin, senior vice president of Mail and Mobile for AOL, told CNET, "It was always our intention to facilitate entrepreneurialism in the Palo Alto office -- we just didn't expect it to work so well."

teacher worktime not the cushy deal everyone thinks it is

fmtyewtk about chickens

A chicken bred for the demands of American supermarket shoppers presumably has lost whatever magical powers the breed once possessed. Western aid workers discovered this in Mali during a failed attempt to replace the scrawny native birds with imported Rhode Island Reds. According to tradition, the villagers divine the future by cutting the throat of a hen and then waiting to see in which direction the dying bird falls—left or right indicates a favorable response to the diviner’s question; straight forward means “no.” But the Rhode Island Red, weighted down by its disproportionately large breast, always fell straight forward, signifying nothing meaningful except the imminence of dinner.

this, and all of it

Much of the increase in library visits has been driven by people coming in to use computers. In Philadelphia, where library visits have risen 11 percent since 2005, the number of computer sessions has increased by 80 percent. Free Internet access has turned libraries into places where city residents, often with help from librarians or dedicated computer assistants, can accomplish tasks that otherwise would require trips to the unemployment office, the health clinic, or City Hall. Said one Philadelphia librarian: "People just think of the library as the first place to go."

Questions showing culture and mores of the time

Peter Thiel: An online pet food company is the paradigm example.

Marc Andreessen: And that’s not such a bad idea anymore! Diapers.com was bought by Amazon for $450m. Golfballs.com turns out to be a pretty good business. Even Webvan is coming back! The grocery delivery company failed miserably back in the ‘90s. But now, city by city, it’s back, trying to figure out crowdsourced delivery. The market is so much bigger now. There were about 50 million people online in the ‘90s. Today it’s more like 2.5 billion. People have gotten acclimated to e-commerce. The default assumption is that everything is available online now.



...


Marc Andreessen: I interned at IBM in 1991. It was extremely screwed up. Those of you who follow IBM history will know it as the John Akers era. I was pretty much given the codex of how to screw up a company. You learn everything at a dysfunctional company. It was fascinating. Once I got to to see the org chart. There were 400,000 employees. I was 14 levels below the CEO. Which meant that my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss was still 7 levels below the CEO.

The skill that you learn at IBM is how to exist at IBM. It’s completely self-referential. It’s the terminal state. People don’t leave.

Publishers say that a carefully released short story, timed six to eight weeks before a big hardcover comes out, can entice new readers who might be willing to pay 99 cents for a story but reluctant to spend $14 for a new e-book or $26 for a hardcover.

Airport bookstores these days can feature not just one stack of James Patterson books, but an entire rack of them, sometimes more than six titles at a time. Mr. Patterson produced 12 books last year, aided on some titles by co-writers. He will publish 13 this year.

Authors don’t seem to be writing digital-only short stories for the money. Advances are typically not part of the bargain, and the works are priced so low (usually $0.99 or $1.99) that they don’t produce much revenue, even if they take several weeks or months to write.

But some authors said that even though they are beginning to accept them as one of the necessary requirements of book marketing, they still find them taxing to produce.

“I have been known to be a little grumpy on the subject sometimes,” said Steve Berry, a popular thriller writer who writes short stories that are released between books. “It does sap away some of your energy. You don’t ever want to get into a situation where your worth is being judged by the amount of your productivity.”

interesting to see where the $ actually went.

Everyblock founder Adrian Holovaty is well known on YouTube for his acoustic guitar covers, which have amassed millions of views. I asked him if Content ID identified the melodies in any of his videos. So far, seven of his videos were identified, with all but one rights holder choosing to leave the video online and collect the revenue. Only one video his cover of the Village People's "YMCA," was taken down by the songwriter, leaving Adrian with a "copyright strike" on his account. YouTube's policy allows three strikes before the account is terminated and all videos removed.


The Flaws in the System

The system's not perfect, though. Unscrupulous individuals are routinely using Content ID to claim content they don't own to harvest ad dollars from unsuspecting users. For example, two of Adrian Holovaty's disputed tracks are Django Reinhardt songs from the 1930s, claimed by an obscure company named "Social Media Holdings."

Other copyright claims may be accidental, as material they don't actually own finds its way into the Content ID database, like this poor guy who's received eight consecutive claims from companies claiming to own George Romero's public domain Night of the Living Dead.

And Content ID isn't immune to false positives, like the bird calls misidentified as music. Worse, for all these case, disputed Content ID claims bypass the DMCA process for counter-claims entirely, as I wrote about in February.

How can a musician decide what's legitimate or worth fighting?

Still, YouTube's Content ID is pushing publishers and rights holders into the modern age. It's an ingenious approach for an otherwise dysfunctional copyright system that's too hard for amateurs to navigate, making money for everyone involved while still allowing free creative expression.

Yangzijiang = Chinese shipbuilder. $3.7bn Singapore listed. They sell new ships for prices not much beyond distressed resale value of 2nd hand vessels. $1.7bn on their balance sheet is loans to various SMEs unable to access funds from banks, who pay interest rates 10-20% in size. "Of course, Yangzijiang's executives exude business elan and I am sure their intentoins are honourable. They certainly say all the right things. For instance, they insist on borrowers having at least three times the value of the loans in collateral, and will accept only land and Chinese A-shares. In reality, of course, they represent a team of shipyard managers building new ships at a price barely above that of second hand ships and lending hand-over-fist during an unprecedented credit boom using a plethora of financial techniques from rural micro finance to venture capital. This $1.7bn loan book is about 80% of the group's NAV. That is not something you want to be invested in."

"modern learning environment" to the NZ MoE means acoustic, heating, lighting, and air quality standards. Says nothing about open plan, and little beyond "you should think about breakouts".

What are the ways our things of (presumably) our creation begin to express/articulate themselves in unexpected and weird ways? What is the catalyst for these differently animated, chatty things? Sensors? Networks? It’s been done before — talismans, tea leaves, idols, urns. We talk to thing and let them talk back to us, guide us from beyond. What different now? A bathroom scale that tweets your weight. Plants that yammer for water.

EdX will enhance the traditional residential model of undergraduate education on both campuses by supporting an unlimited number of experimental online approaches to teaching that can be used by Harvard and MIT faculty to benefit their students. It will also provide global access to some of the world-class instruction that already occurs at both institutions, but which is only one aspect of the full Harvard College and MIT experience.

The futurists are retronauts. This isn’t solely a San Francisco phenomenon. From London to New York and beyond, one cannot fail to notice the rapid growth of heritage manufacture, and a diet of artisanal bread, heirloom tomatoes and fine-tuned coffee have fueled a growing obsession with with the old. Not the old per se, but a version thereof, a simulacrum even. The ‘Olde’. This has led to an emerging paradox in the world of objects. We love the perfection, modernity and reliable consistency of our iThings, but we also feel the need to pop them into a handmade leather pouch.

hsx.com + fantasy football for music

teacher self-eval, coach, and PD-search.

edshelf is a directory of digital tools for educators
app store + yelp for edtech

Harvard's annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs, and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires.

For thirty years, Kodak housed under its Rochester headquarters a research reactor equipped with over three pounds of enriched uranium. Kept secret, the uranium was removed in 2007, Democrat and Chronicle reports.

Though the reactor and its surrounding lab’s existence are perplexing and still a bit disconcerting, the idea behind the operation was fairly solid: Kodak used the uranium and reactor to test chemicals for impurities, as well as run neutron radiography tests. How that research was applied to its actual core operations isn’t clear, however.

links to free download of ERO's report on what's working in Y5-8 science. Includes self-review questions and "indicators of capable practice in science"

summary of practices, building family/teacher/student partnerships to support learning

And that’s the real indie e-publishing story. It might not make the headlines that the big deals will, but it’s the number of working writers making a living from their writing, not the number of millionaires, that is the genuine revolution in e-publishing.

Sir Francis Bacon ... viz the history of science

"I should make it clear that I am all for open access, but I also worry that it is a distraction from the larger challenge of developing meaningful public engagement with research."

aka "I am all for women's rights, but I also worry that it is a distraction from the larger challenge of climate change."

crowdsourced directory of product supply chains and carbon footprints

Best Evidence Synthesis

the kind of nice terse introduction that doesn't waste your time if you already know how to program

Nonverbal clues can be revealing because liars don’t rehearse gestures, just words. They freeze their upper body, oftentimes look down, lower their voice, slow their breathing and blink rate, slump, and then exhibit relief when the interview is over. Interrogators will often end an interview prematurely just to look for that relief—that shift in posture and relaxation.

C’mon guys, get rid of the pool of trouser fabric that’s puddling around your ankles. A tie can show some personality; you don’t have to wear a striped tie every day. If your office doesn’t require a suit, a pair of dress trousers and crisp shirt are perfect. In that case, make sure the three things you invest in are your belt, shoes, and overcoat. Quiet power is a sharp watch—everyone notices one.

You have to make honest feedback a positive experience. It was almost like that red was a gem. We had found an issue that needed special attention. I had to demonstrate with my behavior that I welcomed it: “That’s great visibility. Thank you for sharing. What can we do to help you out?” I’ve been in environments where it’s not as safe to share. You can’t improve if you don’t know what the real situation is. Finally, you’ve got to act on it. If you get honest feedback and do nothing about it, then the feedback will stop.

Possibly the most important technique I've observed over the years is the executive session at the end of the meeting. This is when the Board meets without the CEO and team in the room and has a discussion of the meeting and what the key takeaways are. The executive session can be five minutes or it can be a half hour. Sometimes there is very little to discuss in executive session. Sometimes there is a lot. After the executive session ends, the CEO should either be invited back to have a debrief on the executive session or the Chairman of the Board should meet with the CEO to debrief on the executive session. This is an opportunity for the Board to provide feedback to the CEO on the business, the team, and performance, and the strategy. Boards should not miss this opportunity to provide feedback and CEOs should demand it of them

All this said, I’m not buying wine futures, because prices have gone crazy since about 2005. There has been a huge rise in global demand, particularly from China. It’s gotten so I can buy a case of 1982 Mouton Rothschild that’s perfectly mature for less money than 2009 futures of the same wine, which I won’t be able to drink for 20 years.

Let them rant. When they take a breath, repeat back what they said in your own words. Any counselor will tell you that repetitively explaining anger dispels it. You don’t have to fix anything. You don’t have to make any promises you don’t intend to keep. The important thing is the angry person thinks, “Finally, I found someone who will listen.” It isn’t easy. Police officers, especially, are by training and temperament inclined to immediately seize control of whatever situation we are in. That, more than any other weapon, is our protection. Allowing someone to rant and rave in your presence means giving them at least the illusion of control. It takes a lot of patience and fortitude. I recommend for practice that the guys should try it on their wives.

" I have a theory that burnout is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you’re giving up that makes you resentful. I tell people: Find your rhythm. Your rhythm is what matters to you so much that when you miss it you’re resentful of your work."

Pareto principle for burnout: all work isn't equal, it's a few things that have disproportionate effect

yeah, the Chairman and CEO of Starbucks makes his coffee with a French Press in the morning

I tell people, “Don’t come in here and dump a problem. I have a whole desk full of those. Bring a set of solutions. I’ll help you figure out the trade-offs and the politics involved. Then we’ll make a decision together.”

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures. We thought that was a good thing, but it killed freedom and responsibility. After the company was acquired, I reflected on what went wrong.

A great many tools have been developed for supervised classification, ranging from early methods such as linear discriminant analysis through to modern developments such as neural networks and support vector machines. A large number of comparative studies have been
conducted in attempts to establish the relative superiority of these
methods. This paper argues that these comparisons often fail to take
into account important aspects of real problems, so that the apparent
superiority of more sophisticated methods may be something of an illusion. In particular, simple methods typically yield performance almost
as good as more sophisticated methods, to the extent that the difference
in performance may be swamped by other sources of uncertainty that
generally are not considered in the classical supervised classification
paradigm.

This series of six short modules explores what an LMS is, how it works, what the alternatives are and what is developing in terms of emerging technologies.

The series is designed for all who administer, use and teach with an LMS or are considering doing so. It is practical, up to date and informative – intended to help each reader get more out of the LMS they currently use, understand how thistool for online learning is growing and evolving, and determine how to make the right decisions for the future.

Module 1 - Learning Management Systems in Ontario: Who’s Using What?

Module 2 - Thinking About Choosing a Learning Management System?

Module 3 - From Wikis to Wordpress: How New Technologies Are Impacting the Learning Management System

Module 4 - Making Decisions About Learning Management Systems: Building a Framework for the Future

Module 5 - Different Approaches to Online Learning and the Role of the Learning Management System

Module 6 - 8 Basic Questions About Learning Management Systems: The Answer Sheet

Instructors and students need a private place to work online. This came out frequently in the interviews. Instructors wanted to be able to criticize politicians or corporations without fear of reprisal; students wanted to keep stupid comments from going public or wanted to try out ideas without having them spread all over Facebook: password protected LMSs on secure servers provide that protection.

When we tell stories about ourselves, they also serve another important (arguably higher) function: They help us to believe our lives are meaningful. "The storytelling mind"—the human mind, in other words—"is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence," Gottschall writes. It doesn't like to believe life is accidental; it wants to believe everything happens for a reason. Stories allow us to impose order on the chaos.

"Polish Prime Minister Office yesterday accepted „Digital School program” with „Digital Textbooks” component included. With 45 million PLN (approx. 15 million USD) funding it has been the biggest governmental Open Educational Resources initiative in Poland so far. The government has decided to fund creating full set of educational materials for grades 4-6 (9-11 year olds). All those resources will be available under CC BY license, which is fully free license according to the Definition of Free Cultural Works."

all these things sound great, but if they're not open source then you're investing your effort in a proprietary dead-end. It doesn't even have the advantage of reach, like writing to Microsoft APIs.

Xv6 is a teaching operating system developed in the summer of 2006 for MIT's operating systems course, 6.828: operating systems Engineering. We hope that xv6 will be useful in other courses too. This page collects resources to aid the use of xv6 in other courses, including a commentary on the source code itself.

This is the repository for the Effective Scala document from Twitter.

Foresight.js gives webpages the ability to tell if the user's device is capable of viewing high-resolution images (such as the 3rd generation iPad) before the image has been requested from the server.

Crossfilter is a JavaScript library for exploring large multivariate datasets in the browser. Crossfilter supports extremely fast (<30ms) interaction with coordinated views, even with datasets containing a million or more records; we built it to power analytics for Square Register, allowing merchants to slice and dice their payment history fluidly.

This guide will teach you how to properly contribute to open source projects on GitHub. It assumes that you already know about how to use Git for version control and that you already have a GitHub account.

moothie Charts is a really small charting library designed for live streaming data. I built it to reduce the headaches I was getting from watching charts jerkily updating every second. What you're looking at now is pretty much all it does. If you like that, then read on.

"(It seems that all art movements are nothing more than our culture pirouetting across the Uncanny Valley. When one gets too close to it, a Realism movement jerks it back toward perfect fidelity; then the dreamers jeté across the Valley toward abstraction, and iterations approach the Valley from both sides until the cycle repeats. This might get boring if not for reality's tendency to change.)"

"Those who have taken the plunge into reading e-books stand out in almost every way from other kinds of readers. Foremost, they are relatively avid readers of books in all formats: 88% of those who read e-books in the past 12 months also read printed books.2 Compared with other book readers, they read more books. They read more frequently for a host of reasons: for pleasure, for research, for current events, and for work or school. They are also more likely than others to have bought their most recent book, rather than borrowed it, and they are more likely than others to say they prefer to purchase books in general, often starting their search online."

far more than you ever wanted to know about "this" in Javascript

"I love the videos of professors, amateurs and instructors putting their courseware online. They are a great resource for interest driven learners like me. However, I wonder whether we should be structuring the future of learning as online universities where you are asked to do the equivalent of reading the encyclopedia from cover to cover online. Shouldn't we be looking at the Internet as an amazing network enabling "The Power of Pull" and be empowering kids to learn through building things together rather than assessing their ability to complete courses and produce the right "answers"?" great to see the head of the MIT Media Lab asking these questions

statistical analysis of books whose titles are of the form "the X's daughter"

from the MinEdu site

"But human beings are neurologically wired to stop noticing things that stay the same for a long time. We suck at vigilance. So when complex, stable systems catastrophically fail, so do we. "

"Indeed, such measures could help preserve the viability of convening face-to-face." The environmental cost of shitty meetings is far outweighed, imho, by their social cost. If you brought together 500 people and they actually cooperated and productively engaged with each other, the value to society should be >>>> the environmental cost.

how an extension schedules regular downloads from millions of clients to avoid hammering the server

graph database interface for Java

TinkerPop’s Blueprints 1.2+ makes it easy to build multitenant, graph-based applications. Blueprints is a graph database interface similar to the JDBC of the relational database community. Blueprints is supported by various graph databases including TinkerGraph, Neo4j, OrientDB, DEX, and InfiniteGraph. In addition to providing a standard graph interface, Blueprints includes a collection of graph wrappers. A graph wrapper takes an existing graph implementation, such as Neo4jGraph, and decorates it with new features. For example, wrapping a graph implementation with ReadOnlyGraph prevents graph mutations.

finally, more detail than just "make a silly association" and "have a prebuilt route through your house to drop things".

The main take-away is that the way we use things are changing and the things we are using too because of this co-production that Bridle described in the aforementioned quote.

"the seventh kingdom of the Technium". Man needs a box in Hyde Park.

excellent guide to germinating.

One correspondent in the Sydney Gazette told how he had seen a man carrying a cloth-wrapped bundle under his arm up George St, and asked to see it.

"With perfect indifference as to my feelings and consternation, the man replied it was the head of a New Zealander, which he had purchased from a person lately arrived from that country and that he was going to dispose of it for two guineas to a gentleman who was about to embark for England."

It was a cruel example of supply and demand in a free market.

As Maori discovered they could sell the sacrosanct heads of their enemies for muskets, some - especially among Ngati Toa, Ngapuhi and the tribes of the Far North - put aside their scruples and began producing more heads.

As first they boosted supply by manufacturing excuses to go to war and capture more enemy chiefs; then they began roughly tattooing their slaves, waiting for the scars to heal, beheading them and selling them.

But they created a market glut and prices plummeted.

In a new NBER working paper, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley poke different holes in the conventional view. The old models, they point out, ignore inheritances. In the real world inheritances strongly influence income levels, particularly among the very rich. Mr Romney recently reinforced this very point by exhorting students to borrow from parents if necessary. Taxes on wages and salaries are inadequate to the task of limiting inequality because they punish those who owe high incomes to greater ability and effort, rather than to inheritances. Messrs Piketty and Saez also question the scale of the threat to growth. They point to ratios of capital to output, which are surprisingly stable over time despite tax swings. Their model finds that the optimal tax rate on inheritance could be 50-60% or more.

A few too-easy jabs (really? you think twenty-somethings never use screwdrivers or spanners?). But rabbit ears on the TV ...

In some ways the Tube was far more open to private enterprise than it is today. The lines were at first run as distinct enterprises. For a spell, different companies ran the clockwise and anti-clockwise trains on the Circle Line, even maintaining separate ticket booths. The system may be burrowing back to its roots.

TRUTH is hard.
statistics is easy.
TRUTH with statistics is bloody hard.
COMMUNICATING truthful statistics is even harder.