January 2012
20 posts
Google New Privacy Policy FAQ →
You still have choice and control. You don’t need to sign in to use many of our services, including Search, Maps and YouTube.
Wow, what a privilege. Sites where you need to sign-in to use them are so popular.
“The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process: once...”
– Two lessons from the Megaupload seizure - Glenn Greenwald (via llimllib)
So far, the Obama administration’s legacy in the DOJ has been detention w/o trials, and the right to kill US citizens wherever they are.
“For many decades, universities acted as though they had a public, charitable...”
– The Cost of College Is Probably Going to Keep Going Up | Mother Jones
Weird, weird logic. No mention of the private loan industry, decreasing state funding for public universities because people think higher taxes are a sin, etc
Collection Statistics for Fast Duplicate
Document... →
i-match algorithm
“It turns out that tech companies — especially Apple and Amazon — are the new...”
– Why e-books will be much bigger than you can imagine — Tech News and Analysis (via infoneer-pulse)
“Millions are starving across the world and maybe even next door (Correct) .we...”
– Gil Scott- Heron - I Beg Your Pardon America Lyrics
“We beg your pardon America. We beg your pardon once again. We find out that 7...”
– Gil Scott- Heron - I Beg Your Pardon America Lyrics
s.e. smith at this ain't livin': Beyond the... →
kiriamaya:
Is gender something people need to get? Is it something that can be quantified and assigned values and easily described? Cis people struggle to grasp what it means to be trans—not just nonbinary, but trans in general—and I’m not sure they really need to. The question for me isn’t whether people ‘understand’ gender, but whether they can be respectful about it, whether they can...
“It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiencies, raised productivity...”
– Slavoj Žižek · The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie · LRB 11 January 2012
“The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx...”
– Slavoj Žižek · The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie · LRB 11 January 2012
The best Zizek piece in a while (probably since the height of Occupy). He handily explains the becoming-rent of profit, performs a hat-tip and drive-by criticism of Hardt & Negri, and does an eloquent job of making the...
Dirty Little Secrets: The Trouble With Social... →
journo-geekery:
courtenaybird:
“This potentially marks a real transformation to the way we have looked for information on the web, one with real winners and losers. It also signals a real danger to the balance of power between users and megacompanies. We are increasingly moving from a bottom-up web, where users vote with their links, keyboards and their clicks to show what’s relevant to them,...
“Totally Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis in India”
– via: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/01/14/tuberculosis-resistant-to-all-known-tb-drugs-surfaces-in-india/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+80beats+%2880beats%29
Totally Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis in India
This is the 3rd time this has happened....
The Beyonce fly: Researchers name insect with... →
so-treu:
Australian researchers have named a rare horse fly after Beyonce in honour of its impressive golden behind.
*sits back and waits for f*eminist outrage and pushback*
*looks meaningfully at jacyln friedman*
TheNextWeb on SEO with social search added in →
thenextweb:
Jorg Ruis, CMO at The Next Web: When you look at the impact of search/SEO traffic it’s clear that a lot of companies should be more active on Google if they haven’t done so, as the content on Google shows up in people’s search results as well. It also shows that SEO, next to having the technical side in order, is – and always was – about making content people love to share and...
Building Memory-efficient Java Applications:... →
Great presentation
On Infinite Scalability - Ayende @ Rahien →
Why do we need that buffer?
There are several reasons to want to do that. First, we assume that the system is going to be in production for a relatively long time, so the # of user or their activity is going to grow. Second, in most systems, we are usually talking about some % of the users being active, but there are usually times when you have a significantly more users being active. For...
Driving has lost its cool for young Americans |... →
When we worry about driving and texting, we assume that the most important thing the person is doing is piloting the car. But what if the most important thing they’re doing is texting? How do we free them up so they can text without needing to worry about driving?
The answer, of course, is public transit. In many parts of the world where texting has become ingrained in daily...
December 2011
21 posts
Why (Very White) Iowa and New Hampshire Mean So... →
“You’re hard pressed to find two whiter states,” says Matt Barreto, professor of political science and pollster for Latino Decisions, a polling firm that tracks the political leanings of Latinos.
And the lack of diversity has an effect on who gets initial attention from the media as the electoral process begins.
“The prominence and first-in-nation position of Iowa and New Hampshire do...
so-treu:
COLOUR-BLIND RACISM: The Four Frames darkjez:
ABAGOND—
“Eduardo Bonilla-Silva asked samples of White Americans, most of them born between 1940 and 1980, questions about race issues. He noticed that at least half of them used each of the following four frames:
abstract liberalism – the key word here is “abstract”. Unlike Jim Crow racists, most whites now agree that all...
“We are moving rapidly from an era of an oligopoly of content providers to an...”
– Dan Gillmor, Professor, Cronkite School of Journalism. 2012 will be the year of the content-controller oligopoly.
Nieman Lab is running an interesting 2012 preview series by asking prominent journalism observers what they think the upcoming year will hold.
Gillmor believes the open Internet —...
thechangelog:
As promised, LinkedIn sets IndexTank source freeFrom the [LinkedIn Engineering blog](https://engineering.linkedin.com/open-source/indextank-now-open-source):
> We are proud to announce that the technology behind IndexTank has just been released as open-source software under the Apache 2.0 License! We promised to do this when LinkedIn acquired IndexTank
Both...
Former Bing Product Lead: Why Personalized Social... →
But the issue has never been having access to social data, says Johnson—it’s figuring out how to incorporate it into search in a way that’s beneficial to the user and cost effective. “In the market, data is always seen as this panacea. Like, ‘Oh, we have all this data!’ But doing something with that data is really frickin’ tough,” Johnson says....
Important notice regarding Java packages in... →
it’s like Oracle is trying to do the wrong thing
zafar.se | Bloom Filter Notes →
“In short it would be difficult to come up with a worse hire if you were trying.”
– What’s the Matter with Kansas? : Lawyers, Guns & Money (via dixiecupua)
And this is still not a bad move for kansas. They’re irrelevant in the SEC and if Weis doesn’t change that, it won’t be a disappointment.
“Seems to me that circa junior year or so, I had to have a Duke dean call Sallie...”
– Student debt story: Dear Sallie Mae, I can’t afford you. You’re too high maintenance. And your cutesy name sucks « Natalia Antonova
We can all agree here: paying 40K+ for any degree makes no sense at all. Is it me or do all these loan stories come from students from private institutions?
“While Facebook isn’t acquiring the Gowalla service or technology, we’re sure...”
– A statement from Facebook • Basically emphasizing that they bought out Gowalla’s staff, not its service. It apparently was a marriage of mutual ambition: “It became clear that the way for our team to have the biggest impact was to work together,” said Gowalla CEO Josh Williams. The statements...
Kanye And The Grammys: Why No Album Of The Year... →
nprmusic:
Leaving Kanye bereft of the one Grammy he likely wants the most keeps him in a certain place.
North Carolina's Anti-Abortion License Plates May... →
The ACLU of North Carolina is suing because six attempts to issue an accompanying “Respect Choice” or “Trust Women. Respect Choice” plate have been denied. Today, a federal judge sided with the ACLU, issuing a preliminary injunction to keep the DMV from releasing the plates.
The issue in the case is whether license plates constitute private speech or government...
Geeking with Greg: Browsing behavior for web... →
How Republicans are being taught to talk about... →
rafer:
spytap:
joshsternberg:
The Republican Governor’s Association met this week in Florida to give GOP state executives a chance to rejuvenate, strategize and team-build. But during a plenary session on Wednesday, one question kept coming up: How can Republicans do a better job of talking about Occupy Wall Street?
1. Don’t say ‘capitalism.’
2. Don’t say that the government ‘taxes the...
November 2011
29 posts
“As my team navigated these waters, they would occasionally ask things
like:...”
– http://codahale.com/downloads/email-to-donald.txt
One of the 10 signs that Your Language Is Too Complex
abbyjean:
Audit finds race discrimination in housing based on voice identification
A telephone audit conducted earlier this year in Solano County, California of 40 rental housing properties in which nearly 5,500 people reside, found at least some negative differential treatment toward African-Americans in 65% of the cases and no case in which African-Americans were treated more favorably. ...
Less copies in Python with the buffer protocol and... →
“Qatar’s successful bid [for World Cup 2022] became implicated in a broad-ranging...”
– Football Federation Australia chief not convinced 2022 World Cup will go ahead in Qatar - AP (via llimllib)
Designing a Secure REST (Web) API without OAuth →
Two-Legged OAuth in Python
philipsoutham:
I’ve spent the last day and a half researching, evaluating, and testing different authentication schemes to use in our new API that we’ll be introducing in the coming weeks. I eventually decided to go with 2-legged oauth; it’s not the newest, shiniest toy in the bin, but it seems to be in use many other places across the internets. I also noticed that documentation on setting this...
“I once spent time with a promising entrepreneur who was not a white man. Because...”
– Racism And Meritocracy | TechCrunch
“A surge of Facebook traffic to years-old stories may be forcing news sites to...”
– The unexpected impact of Facebook’s “seamless sharing” on newspaper sites | FT Tech Hub | FTtechhub - Industry analysis – FT.com (via interestingsnippets)
“A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has...”
– Lobbying Firm’s Memo Spells Out Plan to Undermine Occupy Wall Street (via rachelfershleiser)