via https://twitter.com/staeiou/status/201069183440662528

via https://twitter.com/mrgunn/status/207846631830335488

via https://twitter.com/MJ_Coren/status/206910029863976961

"Hospital curtains offer a graceful, if imperfect, solution to the problem of privacy in hospitals, which are ultimately public spaces where it’s seldom feasible (and often inadvisable) to put up solid barriers. Hospital curtains allow people to signal a need for privacy to outsiders, and to create a temporary social space for intimate talk with friends or loved ones in need. But hospital curtains are porous barriers: they don’t completely shut off the inside from the outside, allowing doctors and nurses to enter and leave as necessary and even allowing late-arrivals (a patient’s friend who is arriving to visiting hours late) to comfortably slip in.

Hospital curtains don’t block sight or sound completely, but they soften them enough that both the people inside and the people outside can feel a little more comfortable about their privacy and can focus on what matters to them. And like an office door*, a partially open curtain can be used to indicate something different than a fully closed one (come in if you want to visit vs. give us a minute, would you?) They construct a temporary private shelter in the middle of a bustling public place, one that can be adapted moment-by-moment and rolled away when you’re finished.

But how do you duplicate the crucial, socially meaningful features of this simple device online? How do you draw a temporary, translucent curtain around a comment thread? How do you provide passersby with basic, necessary cues about what’s going on, who’s involved and whose presence would be welcomed (or not welcomed) without giving away everything? How do you create a visibly private space for private conversation inside a public place? How do you send the message that’s sent by a drawn curtain around a patient’s bed with a murmur of voices inside: you’re welcome to come in, he’d love to see you. But he needs his rest, so we probably shouldn’t stay long."

"We find for example that only 1% of tweets disagree with the statements made in a paper – most Twitter users don’t seem to care telling others about papers they dislike or disagree with."

via http://twitter.com/OonaghTweets/status/206668503955148800

via http://twitter.com/lescarr/status/206671194227879936

"The offering raised $229.5 million for the company. But if the bankers had done a better job of pricing the shares — and had come closer to the $35 a share that investors were willing to pay — the company would have reaped twice as much. Putting cash in a company’s coffers is supposed to be the whole purpose of an I.P.O. Isn’t it?

Who got all that extra money? The hedge fund managers and Wall Street insiders who were allocated shares — and who immediately flipped those shares for a quick, easy profit. That’s how I.P.O.s work nowadays: It is assumed that the offering will be underpriced, and anybody who can get shares at the I.P.O. price is guaranteed a killing. This pattern has become the very definition of a successful public offering.

Compared to Splunk, the Facebook I.P.O. was, indeed, a disaster. For starters, there was only the tiniest initial bump, so the Wall Street speculators did not make their usual killing. What’s more, because the company decided, late in the game, to issue 25 percent more shares — and because Morgan Stanley aggressively priced the stock, at $38 a share — Facebook maximized its take, at $16 billion. Long-term investors should be happy about this outcome; the company now has plenty of capital as it competes with Google and the other Internet big boys.

But let’s be honest. Were there really any long-term investors in Facebook that first day? Judging by the torrent of criticism that has rained on Facebook and Morgan Stanley, it sure doesn’t appear that way. Instead, what the Facebook aftermath suggests is that we’ve all become brainwashed into believing that, when it comes to I.P.O.s, up is down and down is up. A successful I.P.O. is one where the company gets hosed by Wall Street. A failed I.P.O. is one where the company’s interests, not those of Wall Street speculators, are served. It’s Alice in Wonderland goes to Wall Street.""being either bullish or bearish requires making a judgment that is years away from being revealed. For bullish investors, it means holding the stock patiently, waiting for the judgment to pay off. That’s what good investors do.""Instead, virtually everyone who bought Facebook on that first day was making a one-day, get-rich-quick calculation. It didn’t work out. Too bad."

"Ojax++ aggregates your documents, communications and events from around the web, you can use tags to sort them into useful project streams for you and your colleagues to work and collaborate with.

A typical project stream might contain bookmarks form Delicious, calendar events from Google Calendar, tweets from Twitter, citations form Connotea and workflows from MyExperiment. Regardless of which web applications you use to conduct your research you can organise and collaborate on your work—in one place—using Ojax++."

via http://www.wordnik.com/lists/outcasts "Words that people on Twitter don't think are words.

I wrote a little script that runs every day. It searches the Twitter API for tweets containing the words, "is not a word". Each (non)word is then looked up using the Wordnik API. If we don't have any definitions for the word, it makes the cut and ends up on this list."

via https://twitter.com/MJ_Coren/status/205158404082245632

via https://twitter.com/MJ_Coren/status/205158938902134784 "how big is the adoption of e-books today?

Mike Shatzkin: I would say that for the big publishers, for what I call immersive reading, which is to say not illustrated books but books where you start on page one and read to the last page, we are in the mid-thirty percent. So out of a hundred thousand copies of a new hard cover they’re going to sell sixty-five thousand print books and thirty-five thousand e-books. But it’s fifty percent for fiction and twenty-five percent of non-fiction."

via https://twitter.com/kvox/status/205496335200288770

via http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/timtalks-failure-success-0518.html

via https://twitter.com/mstem/status/205775946060541952

via https://twitter.com/MJ_Coren/status/205801245322125314 https://twitter.com/MJ_Coren/status/205800931122626560

via https://twitter.com/MJ_Coren/status/205801245322125314

"The younger Weinberg’s career includes a stint managing Radio Shacks and a near-death experience directly below the airplane impact zone in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. He later got back to travel while consulting for a company called Airfarewatchdog. The idea for AutoSlash came from his mother in Florida, who thought there was a business in all of the auto rental rate sleuthing he did before visiting her.

He hooked up with a partner, Mike Miller, and they built the site with just $25,000, pulling back the curtain in 2010. AutoSlash earns money via commissions from Travelocity, which runs AutoSlash’s booking engine in the background though not the proprietary deal hunting software.""It is decidedly uncool to bar consumers from accessing publicly posted deals just because those people didn’t work hard enough to find them."

via https://twitter.com/jess1ecat/status/205996167186747392 "The issue came to a boil last month at a scientific conference in Lyon, France, when three scientists from Google and the University of Cambridge declined to release data they had compiled for a paper on the popularity of YouTube videos in different countries.

The chairman of the conference panel — Bernardo A. Huberman, a physicist who directs the social computing group at HP Labs here — responded angrily. In the future, he said, the conference should not accept papers from authors who did not make their data public. He was greeted by applause from the audience."

via https://twitter.com/kvox/status/206142724091547650

"So if you are on Amazon looking at books and hit the “Shuffle” button, you will get another page with a recommended book, If you are looking t wines, you will get wine. And not necessarily from Amazon. "

via http://creativemontco.org/about-creative-montco/leadership-team/

"In an article by TechCrunch, they state that the fastest growing age group on Facebook is actually the over 65s!""So as the way users search for content shifts once more (first from the age of surfing, then to the age of searching, and now finally to the age of sharing), it’s not surprising that 'search' itself is becoming more social.
"