February 2012
10 posts
Bias and the death penalty →
As a part of the criminal justice system, death penalty sentencing is also biased. While there are persistent difficulties with finding data related to bias, partly due to the nature of bias and insufficient data collection, there are studies and cases that point to the nearly arbitrary nature of sentencing.
One relevant study, “The Impact of Legally Inappropriate Factors on Death Sentencing...
“Google’s Influence Is Slipping, But At A Glacial Pace… – When we looked at the...”
– Citi’s Annual ‘Net Influence Report: Google Continues To Lead As Source Of Traffic To Websites -
[excerpted from an email]
(via rafer)
Map of the Drug War in Mexico →
MapReduce Patterns, Algorithms, and Use Cases →
Not Just Marriage: The Other Fights for Gay and... →
The fight for same-sex marriage is only a piece of a larger civil rights struggle. And with all eyes focused on the issue of matrimony, it’s easy to miss some of the other battlegrounds.
For instance, parental rights has long been an issue for gay couples concerned about legal protections. In Iowa, health officials are looking to the courts for how to identify same-sex couples with...
Why I’m Team Kalinda: A New Face For Desi Women On... →
The New SolrCloud: Overview « Sematext Blog →
SolrCloud is in trunk now.
January 2012
25 posts
New Federal Rule Makes LGBT Housing Discrimination... →
On Saturday the Obama Administration announced historic new federal rules that will strengthen housing discrimination protections for transgender and other LGBT people. The new regulations were announced by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan at the 24th National Conference on LGBT Equality: Creating Change, and will be officially published this coming week. The new rule...
White Quarterback Privilege Part I: Tim Tebow,... →
One of Tebow’s greatest privileges has been his “freedom to fail”. When he had a truly atrocious training camp, he wasn’t cut, but promoted to back-up. When his humiliating loss against the Lions revolutionized the term “incomplete pass”, he was still granted another start. When his arm failed, the offense was changed to suit his legs. If he was terrible for 58 minutes, he was never benched for...
Racial Stereotyping and Perceptions of Competence... →
A recent study published in the Academic of Management Journal found that media coverage rarely gave African American quarterbacks credit for leadership. When their teams do well, it is because of their natural athletic talent; when they do poorly, it is lack of leadership — blame not equally placed on White quarterbacks when their teams do poorly. So Blacks are blamed more for losses but get...
Bay Area Technology Professionals Can’t Get Hired... →
journo-geekery:
While Web-based companies like Facebook and Google are scouring the world for new talent to hire, older technology workers often find that their skills are no longer valued.
Part of the problem, analysts said, is that many of the companies shedding jobs are technology manufacturers, while most of the companies that are hiring are Internet-based.
While employment figures...
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...
