March 2010
123 posts
Modern Slavery →
abbyjean:
In textbooks across the country, students are still taught that slavery in the US ended with the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865. But the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) knows better, and its Modern-Day Slavery Museum is traveling throughout Florida to drive that point home—that slavery persists in the agriculture fields of the state right up through this very day.
...
A brief, yet helpful, lesson on elementary... →
Fiona had taken it down to the other end of the table, next to her plate. I asked if she’d finished with it, and it turned out that she HADN’T EVEN STARTED. She’d just acquired the lock, then left the resource unavailable while she responded to a completely unrelated event.
I explained to her that it’s an elementary principle of concurrent system design that you minimise your lock...
Quake Accentuated Chasm That Has Defined Haiti →
abbyjean:
Haiti has long had glaring inequality, with tiny pockets of wealth persisting amid extreme poverty, and Pétionville itself was economically mixed before the earthquake, with poor families living near the gated mansions and villas of the rich. But the disaster has focused new attention on this gap, making for surreal contrasts along the streets above Port-au-Prince’s central districts....
“And yet, [former Bush speechwriter David] Frum’s ouster [from the American...”
– Mark Schmitt, “The High Cost of Conservative Intellectual Bankruptcy” (via thepoliticalpartygirl)
“there are hints that the next generation is heading down this third path, this...”
– The Way We Live Now - The Marrying Kind - NYTimes.com
The Census and the Social Construction of Race »... →
The changing categories in the U.S. Census show us that racial and ethnic categories are political categories. They are chosen by government officials who are responding not to biological realities, but to immigration, war, prejudice, and social movements.
Race, Clothes, and Perceptions of Criminality |... →
After presenting lots of statistics about racial disparities in criminal justice, I showed my class the videos from ABC News What Would You Do? in which first White and than Black youths vandalize a car in a public parking lot.
There is only one 911 call on the White boys, but ten on the Black boys. Plus, while the White boys are vandalizing, someone calls 911 to report people who are...
Jill Scott On Interracial Dating: "There Is A... →
Jill Scott has stirred up a debate between Essence readers after discussing her views on interracial dating with the magazine, stating that she “felt a little wince” when her African-American friend told her he had married a white woman.
In a post titled “Commentary: Jill Scott Talks Interracial Dating,” Scott explains that she believes the “wince” she...
OAuth Playground →
“the fundamental theorem of the software industry is the idea that everything...”
– I Can’t Wait for NoSQL to Die - Ted Dziuba
The Revenge of the Fat Guy [Follow-up to the case... →
Product Market Fit Myths
First, I agree that the best way to build a big company would be to find product market fit and then raise a bunch of money to build a big business. But sometimes, things aren’t so clear. Let me try to describe some of the ways things can get messy as a series of myths about product market fit.
Myth #1: Product market fit is always a discrete, big bang event
...
Why Women Don't Want Macho Men - WSJ.com →
the Face Lab researchers proved something remarkable. They could predict how masculine a woman likes her men based on her nation’s World Health Organization statistics for mortality rates, life expectancy and the impact of communicable disease. In countries where poor health is particularly a threat to survival, women leaned toward “manlier” men. That is, they preferred their...
The Easy Way to Extract Useful Text from Arbitrary... →
Using neural neural networks
“… Here is what’s depressing about dating while feminist. Feminism is what I do...”
– Jaclyn Friedman, in “Fucking While Feminist” interview by Amanda Hess in Washington City Paper (via rkb)
Nick Saban on the psychology of the repeat - Dr.... →
There hasn’t been a repeat BCS champion in the 12-year BCS era (USC’s Associated Press title in 2003 notwithstanding, the last team to claim two essentially undisputed national championships was Nebraska in 1994-95, also the last teams to put together back-to-back undefeated seasons), and hasn’t been a repeat SEC champion since the height of the Spurrier era at Florida in...
Nancy Pelosi, Fashion Icon - Page 2 - The Daily... →
Purple, the color of bipartisanship, has been Pelosi’s go-to wardrobe shade at major moments throughout her term as speaker. She wore the same lavender suit and pearls to President Obama’s first State of the Union address, on Jan. 27. (Like first lady Michelle Obama, Pelosi is not afraid to repeat a look.) She wore eggplant for a March 2 press conference to discuss the state of health-care...
Tebow's pre-Wonderlic prayer request falls flat |... →
At the Scouting Combine, the Wonderlic exam is administered to players in groups. The 12-minute test is preceded by some brief instructions and comments from the person administering the test.
Per a league source, after the person administering the test to Tebow’s group had finished, Tebow made a request that the players bow their heads in prayer before taking the 50-question exam.
...
Byrd Rule To Send Health Care Back To House, Rules... →
the ruling might give Democrats another option — the public one.
Democratic leadership no longer has to worry that additional amendments would send it back to the House, since it must return to the lower chamber regardless. The Senate is now free to put to the test that much-debated question of whether 50 votes exist for a public option. Democrats could also elect to expand Medicare...
“To me, it’s important to remember that we do bring feminism into the bedroom,...”
– Me at Examiner.com, “Feminists who submit to degrading kinky sex?” (via rkb)
Jesse Helms, gay rights advocate? That’s what his... →
Despite Mr. Helms’s storied opposition to ‘a homosexual lifestyle,’ the Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, N.C., is challenging the idea that he was a “homophobe” or obstructive in the AIDS fight.
According to the center’s Web site, ‘It was Senator Helms who worked most tirelessly to protect the very principles of freedom that homosexuals are denied in many other nations.’ John Dodd, president...
Dennis Forbes on Software and Technology - The... →
In contrast to all of the “everyone is a publisher and the internet changes everything” bluster that is used to herald the wave of change that NoSQL brings, the reality is that it’s a very small percentage of users that post submissions and add comments, or even that do the simplest possible action of clicking an arrow.
Users overwhelmingly simply consume data, whether it’s the latest tech...
Tuesday Night Tech - MongoDB UI Edition
timgourley:
This week I’m focusing on UI options for administering MongoDB. Sure, you could use the javascript command shell “mongo” from the command line, but a lot of individuals out there are churning out viable options for administering the popular document-oriented database. All of these tools are relatively easy to get running, so I encourage you to play with them to see which one you...
Bias Called Persistent Hurdle for Women in... →
abbyjean:
A report on the underrepresentation of women in science and math by the American Association of University Women, to be released Monday, found that although women have made gains, stereotypes and cultural biases still impede their success.
Even if male math geniuses outnumbered female geniuses 3 to 1, Dr. Hopkins said, it would be reasonable to expect one female math professor for...
Recommendation Systems: Interview with Satnam Alag →
Google News’ personalization is my personal favorite. Google News is a good example of building a scalable recommendation system for a large number of users (several million unique visitors per month) and a large number of items (several million new stories every two months), with constant item churn. This is different from Amazon’s, whose rate of item churn is much lower. Google...
Recommendation Systems: Interview with Satnam Alag →
ReadWriteWeb: In our recent post about Netflix, we identified four main approaches to recommendations: Personalized recommendation: based on prior behavior of the user; Social recommendation: based on prior behavior of similar users; Item recommendation: based on the item itself; And a combination of all three. Do you agree with the four approaches we laid out in our article?
Satnam: Those...
Geeking with Greg: People often repeat web... →
The most obvious way that a search tool can improve the user experience given the prevalence of re-finding is for the tool to explicitly remember and expose that user’s search history.
Certain aspects of a person’s history may be more useful to expose … For example, results that are re-found often may be worth highlighting … The result that is clicked first …...
Right Wing Reacts With Rage →
abbyjean:
– Right-wing radio host Neal Boortz tweeted that “Nancy Pelosi will be grinning and laughing” following the health care vote, which “will do more damage than 9/11.” [3/21/10]
– Conservative blogger and and CNN contributor Erick Erickson bemoaned that “Democrats voted to put people in jail who have no insurance, raise the costs of health care, destroy the federal government’s bond...
Republican Lawmakers Respond to Protester Epithets... →
Rep. Steve King (R-IA), on racial and gay slurs being hurled at Democratic congressmen: “I just don’t think it’s anything. … There are a lot of places in this country that I couldn’t walk through. I wouldn’t live to get to the other end of it.”
Rep. Nunes (R-CA) on slurs and epithets (“n——r”…
“It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked....”
– With Cheap Food Imports, Haiti Can’t Feed Itself (via dixiecupua)
“find it really quite amazing that anyone shows up at elections for the present...”
– The true election: a practical option for real political change - Mencius Moldbug
Far from his best essay, but I liked this part.
(via llimllib)
thepoliticalpartygirl:
Tea Party Protests: ‘Ni**er,’ ‘Faggot’ Shouted At Members Of Congress notthatkindagay:
Abusive, derogatory and even racist behavior directed at House Democrats by Tea Party protesters on Saturday left several lawmakers in shock.
Preceding the president’s speech to a gathering of House Democrats, thousands of protesters descended around the...
graph-theory-algorithms-book - Project Hosting on... →
A GNU-FDL book on algorithmic graph theory by David Joyner, Minh Van Nguyen, and Nathann Cohen. This is an introductory book on algorithmic graph theory. Theory and algorithms are illustrated using the Sage open source mathematics software. To get an overview of the book, you can view the table of contents as shown below or download the complete book.
“If you don’t speak English, any songs written in English are instrumental music....”
– Why Americans Don’t Like Jazz - DYSKE.COM
I’m part of the school of thought that thinks that lyrics in music are take second place to ryhtm, melody, tone, etc. For me, lyrics are just a handy way of remembering melodies, nothing more. Whether they actually make sense is another matter.
I...
How Progressive Are You? →
The CAP has determined me to be “extremely progressive”
“Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended...”
– Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society (Yglesias) (via abbyjean)
“Sarkozy had previously come down hard on France’s sex industry. Back in 2003,...”
– French Politician Calls For Return Of Brothels (via pleaseshowmehowtolive)
Full text indexing with MongoDB →
nosql:
We’ve seen this done before with CouchDB, but I still think the full text indexing should be delegated to specialized solutions like Lucene and Solr.
Secondly, if I got it right, the proposed solution is re-inverting the index and store it based on the indexed documents which I don’t think is a good idea either. It will lead to basically doubling the number of documents stored, plus...
Shalin Says...: Merging Lucene and Solr →
A couple of weeks back, Apache Lucene Committer and PMC member, Michael McCandless started a discussion on factoring out a shared, standalone Analysis package for Lucene, Solr and Nutch. During the discussions, Yonik Seeley, Solr Creator, proposed merging the development of Lucene and Solr….
