May 2008 Archives

Gimpyblog broke the news internationally of Dore going bust, following up a comment from a Dore employee. Back in January, he published a detailed analysis of the Dore accounts, flagging up serious concerns about their viability even then. The mainstream media continued to encourage parents to put their money into the "miracle cure".

Jon from the blog Holfordwatch performed an amusing experiment in 2007 when Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology in Oxford, published a paper compiling the concerns about Dore's "research base" in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health. He contacted newspapers who had carried flattering coverage of Dore, including the Daily Mail, Manchester Evening News, Guardian, Times and Telegraph. "I really thought - by putting so much time into this - I would persuade at least some of the papers I spoke to to run the story. [But] the only response I've had is an 'out of office' autoreply.

One of the reasons these groups are attracting attention is that they are under pressure, especially on the Peruvian side of the border, not only from the usual suspects (miners, loggers, and ranchers), but also from a French petroleum company that wants to drill in the area. Why can't we go with that story: protecting the environment, wildlife, and the local people's ways of life against the shattering impact of wreckless resource extraction to feed petroleum addiction? Why do we have to stoop to the whole 'they think the plane is a giant bird or spirit' and 'their way of life was unchanged for 10,000 years' cannard?

We think that even English professors should respect the difference between correlation and causation: just because ignorance of big lakes and oratorios got worse when the digital age dawned doesn't mean that the latter caused the former. To establish that, you need data. Alas, there isn't much. The ideal experiment is hard to pull off: to study the effect of digital technology on cognitive processing in a rigorous way, you must randomly assign groups of young people to use it a lot, a little or not at all, then follow them for years. As one 19-year-old of our acquaintance said about the chances of getting teens to volunteer for the "not at all" group, "Are you out of your [deleted] mind?"

Greenfield's prose--a near-continuous train wreck of redundancies, mixed metaphors and self-contradictions ("this literally incredible concept," "an ever-changing visual image")--is perhaps the worst enemy of her attempts to persuade. This is unfortunate, because however much technophiles may snort, she is articulating widely held fears that have a basis in fact. Unlike even their immediate antecedents, the latest electronic media are at once domestic, mobile and work-related, blurring the boundaries between these spaces, and video games are at their forefront, both in terms of the time users lavish on them and their ceaseless technological innovation. A generational rift has opened that is in many ways more profound than the equivalent shifts associated with radio or television: more alienating for those unfamiliar with new technologies, more immersive for those who are.

Trixie Tracker crunches simple daily input into rich, informative charts, graphs and striking visual summaries. You can use the software to record sleep, diapers, bottles, solids, medicine, nursing, and pumping activity. When you sign up for an account, you'll choose a personal web address which will become your Trixie Tracker Site. As you start recording events you'll better understand your baby's daily patterns and needs, and you can share that information online with family and friends.

The assessment of peer-review costs is part of an attempt to provide - for the first time - a picture of the costs of the entire scholarly communications system, from the production of research outputs to the reading of them, focusing on their publication, distribution and access.

The study estimates that the global cost of undertaking and communicating the results of research reported in journal articles is £175 billion a year, made up of £116 billion for the costs of the research itself and £25 billion for publication, distribution and access to the articles (which includes the hidden costs of peer review) and £34 billion for reading them.

Few studies examine the use of personal health information by patients themselves. This project suggests how patients who choose to explicitly share health data within a community may benefit from the process, helping them engage in dialogues that may inform disease self-management. We recommend that future designs make each patient's health information as clear as possible, automate matching of people with similar conditions and using similar treatments, and integrate data into online platforms for health conversations.

Fit Watch are a fluid group of people who have come together to resist and oppose the tactics of the Forward Intelligence Teams (cops who harass protesters). (...)

We aim to make it harder for them to photograph and intimidate us by getting in the way of their cameras, taking photos and publishing as much information as we can about them on our blog.

Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Road," takes place in a world that, because of some unexplained catastrophe, has just about ended. The sky is gray, the rivers are black, and color is just a memory. The landscape is covered in ash, with soot falling perpetually from the air. The cities are blasted and abandoned. The roads are littered with corpses either charred or melted, their dreams, Mr. McCarthy writes, "ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts."

The rhythm of one's workday here is also quite unique. Anytime after 11:30 a.m., someone will ring a large bell that sits at the entrance of the Institute. And when the bell tolls, the economists all head for lunch together; if the bell hasn't been rung by early afternoon, one of the staff -- concerned for the health of the economists -- will ring it to make sure we actually eat. And of course, lunchtime conversations are all about economics.

Around 3 p.m. the bell once again flushes everyone from their offices, we fuel up with espresso, and faculty and graduate students drape themselves on a series of lounges, ready for the afternoon seminar.

A video that purportedly shows a living, breathing space alien will be shown to the news media Friday in Denver.

Jeff Peckman, who is pushing a ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver to prepare the city for close encounters of the alien kind, said the video is authentic and convinced him that aliens exist.

YouNoodle is a place to discover and support the hottest early-stage companies and university innovation. We provide business competition, events, and mailing list features for real-world startup communities.

The Stanford doctoral candidate who is one of YouNoodle's creators is Rebeca Hwang. According to the YouNoodle Web site, she is a chemistry and physics "Olympiad medalist" of Argentina, and was awarded a full scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

YouNoodle has been in beta since March 2007 at a number of universities, including Harvard University, Imperial College London, Oxford University, Stanford, and the University of California at Berkeley.

The most spectacular innovation of Nico Nico Douga is the way comments are placed on Nico Nico Douga. Users of Nico Nico Douga can write directly on the moving image. They comment while they watch videos, and add the comments directly on top of the video. (...)

From a technical perspective all this is no rocket science. What makes Nico Nico Douga so special is the way this platform has taken up. Nico Nico Douga exists since little more than one year, but is by now the 6th most visited website in Japan. There are by now more the 6 million registered users, more than one million (!) uploaded videos, and more then one billion (!!) comments - and all this in the course of not more than one and a half years.

An anonymous donor has given the University of Chicago $5 million to be spent at cash-strapped Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. With the money, lab officials will be able to stop a rolling furlough program that since February has forced employees to take periodic unpaid leave and slashed their pay by 12.5%. The lab will still lay off roughly 140 workers, but officials also announced that those cuts would be restructured to give employees a chance to take voluntary layoffs before the involuntary ones begin.

Vem är det som talar på nätet? Vem lyssnar? När tidningen Fokus häromdagen bjöd till seminarium om internet och demokrati var frågorna stora och öppna. Deltog gjorde bland andra Martin Jönsson, journalist tillika nyutnämnd gästprofessor på institutionen för journalistik och masskommunikation vid Göteborgs universitet, Dagens Arenas redaktör Katrine Kielos, s-bloggaren Jonas Morian samt journalisten och debattören Susanna Popova.

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences -- open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants -- often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

To join, customers must download an application to their phones and register via mobile web, allowing them to choose the coupons they like. When making their purchase at McDonalds, the coupon is redeemed by placing the phone near the RFID reader at the register, instantly adding the item to the order. To complete the order, payment can also be done using NTT Docomo's iD mobile wallet.

These results suggest that immediate online readership, with the assumption that everyone downloading the paper is reading it, and eventual citation counts are highly correlated, casting some doubt on the potential view that manuscript citation numbers are often a product of 'reference mining' rather than a reflection of the influential science shaping an author's work.

Interestingly, as other 'Web 2.0' technologies such as blogs and paper commenting become more entrenched in the community as a way of providing feedback on papers and tracking their popularity, following reader traffic from these additional venues may provide other variables with which to calibrate citation numbers, providing a more complete picture of manuscript influence on a particular field.

I morgon onsdag, lanseras www.designarkiv.se - en bokstavlig guldgruva för den som intresserar sig för svensk form och design. (...) Med den nya sajten tillgängliggörs drygt 25 000 foton, skisser, texter och film ur den svenska designhistorien från 1845 till i dag.

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively--and even how to appreciate old books.

• Webbsöndag: socialt *och* semantiskt
• Maskiner lär sig av Wikipedia

Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.

Our approach is simple, provide the users of social tagging services with a way to use terms from controlled vocabularies, which we call 'semantic tags', as easily as they now use tags created by themselves. In principle, this could allow for much better organization of tagged collections through the inference and disambiguation made possible by the semantic tags.      

<link title="schema(DC)" rel="schema.dc" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" />
<meta name="dc.publisher" content="Nature Publishing Group" />
<meta name="dc.language" content="en" />
<meta name="dc.rights" content="&#169; 2008 Nature Publishing Group" />
<meta name="dc.title" content="Crystal structure of squid rhodopsin" />
<meta name="dc.creator" content="Midori Murakami" />
<meta name="dc.creator" content="Tsutomu Kouyama" />
<meta name="dc.identifier" content="doi:10.1038/nature06925" />

<meta name="citation_journal_title" content="Nature" />
<meta name="citation_publisher" content="Nature Publishing Group" />
<meta name="citation_authors" content="Paul Schenk, Isamu Matsuyama, Francis Nimmo" />
<meta name="citation_title" content="True polar wander on Europa from global-scale small-circle depressions" />
<meta name="citation_volume" content="453" />
<meta name="citation_issue" content="7193" />
<meta name="citation_firstpage" content="368" />
<meta name="citation_doi" content="doi:10.1038/nature06911" />

Mind-expansion may soon, therefore, become big business. Even though the drugs have been developed to treat disease, it will be hard to prevent their use by the healthy. Nor, if they are without bad side-effects, is there much reason to. And if that is so, there may be a very positive side-effect on the profits of their makers.

We're fucking hot:

 
We were the first bloggers. We created rap music. Silicon Valley. McSweeney's. Indie rock.

And we are the Internet generation. We founded Google. Wikipedia. DailyKos. Gawker. Meet-Up. MySpace. Ebay. YouTube.

We're not slackers. We are Tiger Woods, Snoop Dogg, Parker Posey, Tina Fey, Johnny Depp, Michael Jordan, Dr. Dre and Lance Armstrong, to name a few.

You've earned your retirement, boomers. So rest assured that your babies are in good hands as you go. As a member of the nowhere generation, now come of age, I'm proud to announce that our time has arrived. We may not be the next Greatest Generation, but we're pretty good at calling bullshit.

The paper presents and questions the main claims made about digital natives and analyses the nature of the debate itself. We argue that rather than being empirically and theoretically informed, the debate can be likened to an academic form of a 'moral panic'. We propose that a more measured and disinterested approach is now required to investigate 'digital natives' and their implications for education.

The criteria that companies use to pick a site keep evolving, says Mike Manos, Microsoft's director of data centres. His team feeds 35 sets of data into an electronic "heat" map of the world. With colours that range from green to red, it shows where conditions are favourable and which places should be avoided. And Microsoft needs a lot of choice: if a new service suddenly becomes popular, it needs to be able to increase computing capacity quickly. That is also why it uses shipping containers pre-loaded with up to 2,000 servers, which can be up and running within hours. In the firm's Chicago data centre, over 200 such containers will populate an entire floor.

There's much to criticize in all this. The piece itself is (surprisingly, given its snark-bred author and its premise/promise of "oversharing") terrifically dull; it tacitly glorifies a woman whose career has been catapulted by her capacity for cruelty; it could almost implode under the weight of its own heavily varnished solipsism.

Endast genom uppbyggnaden av en social normstruktur kan vi bevara nätet öppet och samtidigt bekämpa de avarter och hot som dyker upp.

Det mest befriande [med Zittrains bok] är att den undersöker hur tekniken faktiskt används, och vågar blanda in moral och normer i diskussionen om nätets framtid. Och Zittrains slutsatser är provokativa: de antyder att i stället för att hitta tekniska lösningar eller hårdföra rättsliga insatser mot problemen på intenet, så är kanske enda vägen framåt att förhandla fram sociala normer och identiteter som användarna kan acceptera - en förhandling som bara kan skadas av en övertro på teknik och polis.

I Bagdad 2005 blev jag och min fotograf Paul en dag fasttagna i en säkerhetskontroll i Gröna zonen, just för att de funnit "spår av sprängämnen" i vår packning. Stort hallå, förstås. Den amerikanske soldat som eskorterat oss till platsen backade, blek, bakåt, samtidigt som han upprepade gånger intygade att han INTE kände oss. Ett antal tungt beväpnade civila säkerhetsvakter kom ut i den låga kvällsolen med höjda vapen och vi blev visiterade igen och igen. Den där omsvängningen i stämning var aningen läskig: det gick liksom ett litet stråk av kyla genom den ökenvarma luften, och plötsligt var man misstänkt och väldigt, väldigt ensam.

Their music has familiar elements, yet often sounds like pop music by someone who has read about the form, but never heard it, and then handed the essential building blocks to make some songs. (...)

But the band's music remains completely strange and oddly familiar at the same time. I'd been told more than once that we should all work together, and it seems the suggestion was fated to be realized.

Att bloggsfären skulle domineras av shopping- och modebloggar var inget som bibliotekarien Erik Stattin, en av pionjärerna i den svenska bloggkulturen, hade väntat sig. Han startade sin blogg Mymarkup redan 2001 och för några år sedan räknades den som en av de viktigaste i Sverige.

"Det är tråkigt, men framför allt konstigt att modebloggarna har så många läsare. Det finns många genrer som borde kunna få minst lika mycket uppmärksamhet. Men unga tjejer är så mycket ute på nätet. Sedan är ju pr-byråerna och modeföretagen skickliga på att marknadsföra sig i den här världen", säger han.

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it's time for what Zappos calls "The Offer." The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: "If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you've worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus." Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Using Amazon Web Services, Hadoop and our own code, we ingested 405,000 very large TIFF images, 3.3 million articles in SGML and 405,000 xml files mapping articles to rectangular regions in the TIFF's. This data was converted to a more web-friendly 810,000 PNG images (thumbnails and full images) and 405,000 JavaScript files -- all of it ready to be assembled into a TimesMachine. By leveraging the power of AWS and Hadoop, we were able to utilize hundreds of machines concurrently and process all the data in less than 36 hours.

But being completely secretive isn't ideal, and this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past. We will try to periodically tell you about new things, explain old things, give advice, spread news, and engage in conversations.

Following Piaget's model of equilibration we propose that people engage in knowledge building by contributing new information to wikis and by restructuring existing articles because of cognitive conflicts5. Using Luhmann's theory, this conflict can be described as irritation. We propose that when people work with a wiki they have to see if their own individual knowledge matches with the information the wiki provides. This matching process can lead to different results: If people feel that the wiki's information is congruent to their individual knowledge then there is no need for equilibration and people do not accommodate or assimilate, either internally nor externally. In contrast, if people feel that the wiki's information differs from their own knowledge, there is a need for equilibration, which people can satisfy by processes of internal or external assimilation or accommodation.

FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[...]

EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN

Luis von Ahn - father of noteworthy projects like the ESP Game (a.k.a. Google's Image Labeler. Radar post) and reCAPTCHA (Radar post) - has launched Games with a Purpose, in short GWAP.

GWAP and the new games - Tag a tune, Squigl, Verbosity, and Matchin, puts von Ahn and his team at Carnegie Mellon by a wide margin at the forefront of tapping into human cycles to do jobs that computers only can solve poorly or not at all.

At FOO Camp last year von Ahn listed the main motivation for his projects as "I hate paying people to do things." Beyond the obvious chuckle such a statement releases, there is a truth hidden to it that Amazon's Mechanical Turk is no doubt feeling and that every HR department knows: people only motivated by money often do a terrible job.

FAVRD runs on a no-webcock algorithm. If you see Twitter as a venue for public relations or marketing, or as an audience eager to hear news of a post on your 'blog', or a rich hot sticky vertical, or if you consider yourself a web strategist, or if you talk earnestly about social media, or if you can read Techcrunch or listen to the Gillmor gang with a straight face, it's very unlikely the things you say on Twitter will show up here.

Google Health wants to become the central place where you organize your health information and share it with people or services you trust. Since this information is very sensitive, Google takes a lot of precautions by using SSL connections and a separate privacy policy that clearly states: "You control who can access your personal health information. By default, you are the only user who can view and edit your information. If you choose to, you can share your information with others."

This is a big test of trust for Google and probably the most personal service ever offered by the company. While you can also enter your credit card information in Google Checkout, your location in iGoogle or Google Maps, personal information in orkut, Blogger and YouTube, Google Health is about your existence.

As soon as we sat down, she unrolled her burrito and took a little bottle out of her purse. It was a little stainless-steel aerosol canister that looked for all the world like a pepper-spray self-defense unit. She aimed it at her burrito's exposed guts and misted them with a fine red oily spray. I caught a whiff of it and my throat closed and my eyes watered.

"What the hell are you doing to that poor, defenseless burrito?"

She gave me a wicked smile. "I'm a spicy food addict," she said. "This is capsaicin oil in a mister."

"Capsaicin --"

"Yeah, the stuff in pepper spray. This is like pepper spray but slightly more dilute. And way more delicious. Think of it as Spicy Cajun Visine if it helps."

My eyes burned just thinking of it.

"You're kidding," I said. "You are so not going to eat that."

Her eyebrows shot up. "That sounds like a challenge, sonny. You just watch me."

She rolled the burrito up as carefully as a stoner rolling up a joint, tucking the ends in, then re-wrapping it in tinfoil. She peeled off one end and brought it up to her mouth, poised with it just before her lips.

Right up to the time she bit into it, I couldn't believe that she was going to do it. I mean, that was basically an anti-personnel weapon she'd just slathered on her dinner.

She bit into it. Chewed. Swallowed. Gave every impression of having a delicious dinner.

Nu berättar Malin Sandström att forskare (originalartikel) hittat på ett nytt sätt att mäta styrkan hos chili med hjälp av nanorör.

Forskarna testade sin metod på några olika chilisåser - i kategorin som marknadsförs med eldsflammor och döskallar, med Scovillestyrkan tryckt på etiketten - och fick god överensstämmelse. Världens starkaste chilisås, Mad Dog's Revenge, mättes till 991700 Scoville (mot uppgivna 1000000). Ett mesigt ingenting jämfört är vanlig Tabasco, som uppges ha en Scovillestyrka på 2500-5000 och enligt mätningen låg på 3995 Scoville.

Se folk äta det på DuTuben.

• Steg 1: "This will include the huge task of detoxifying the trillions of gallons of coal slurry that is held in reservoirs throughout the region. This will involve eco-machines designed to render the material harmless to the environment and local inhabitants as well as to create beneficial products from the treated slurry solids."
  
  
• Steg 2: "This will include a regional reforestation initiative, which has already been researched and is in the planning phase. It involves new forests, agro-forests and planting short rotation, fast growing woody crops for biomass production for subsequent conversion into fuels and other energy sources."
  
  
• Steg 3: "Coal can be replaced with renewable sources of energy. Already suitable Appalachian wind sites have been discovered that can provide competitive sources of energy. [...] [I]f it is paired with another renewable energy source like woody biomass from willows and poplars, a viable energy system can be developed."
  
  
• Steg 4: Folket äger landet.

"Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary -- the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab.

It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.

So I said, call me Trimtab."

Ultimately, her ambitions prove more musical than professional, and her willingness to make herself a secondary player here-- behind Waits, Sitek, and TV on the Radio-- makes the whole enterprise seem like a lark, an anti-vanity project. There are no tacky pronouncements of stars-are-just-like-you realness here, no statements about herself or her celebrity or really anything at all. The only thing we've learned about her is that she really, really like Tom Waits. That's more than enough to avoid catastrophe, but not quite enough to make Anywhere I Lay My Head much more than a curio.

• SciLink - "...is an online community with the goal of helping you to discover scientists, authors, and relationships. SciLink's network of 106,264,967 relationships is built by mining scientific data that exist on the web. Our databases currently contain over 5.8 million scientists and 14 million articles." Håller hus i Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  
  
• Laboratree - "A place conducive to experimentation, investigation, observation, collaboration, and anything related to science." Utvecklas av Indiana University School of Medicine Bioinformatics Core.
  
  
• Ologeez! - "...is about providing academic researchers and professionals with the tools needed to connect, share, and learn about their fields. A unique blend of citation recommendations, search tools, collaborative groups and more has been developed to meet this goal."
  
  
• Taverna - "Effectively Taverna allows a biologist or bioinformatician with limited computing background and limited technical resources and support to construct highly complex analyses over public and private data and computational resources, all from a standard PC, UNIX box or Apple computer. The screenshot below shows the workbench in action running an example workflow." Inte så värst seriöst, utvecklas av en doktorand vid Stanford.
  
  Relaterat: myExperiment.

Human Smoke, in other words, is not a conscientious pacifist tract. It is not a clever contribution to today's debate on warfare, and it does not add anything to what we know about World War II. It is a cheerful contribution to the movement against scholarship--a movement which has advanced so far, in fact, that I fully expect these observations, too, to be condemned as "elitism." As one who does contribute (it's pathetic, I know) to the mainstream media on a regular basis, I know that any author who expresses a sliver of doubt about the wisdom of amateurs risks bringing down a torrent of recrimination and insult upon his head. But if we have arrived at the point where a solemn and excited individual can cobble together anecdotes from old newspapers and Nazi diaries, and write them up in the completely contextless manner of blog posts, and suggest that he has composed a serious critique of America's decision to enter World War II, and then receive praise from respected reviewers in distinguished publications, then maybe it is time to say: Stop.

The spectacle is framed as a sci-fi space odyssey, with Mr. West as a lone explorer whose starship crashes on an unknown planet. He's stranded in a landscape of colored lights, billowing smoke -- probably enough dry ice to cool Death Valley -- and gorgeous, panoramic video images of clouds, galaxies, fireworks and cosmic eruptions. He converses with his computerized ship, named Jane, and with shooting stars. He raps with barely a respite, and bounds around the stage: striding, hunching, pumping his fist, falling to his knees, grinding against the stage, flailing, shouting his rhymes. It is a show of stamina and lonely self-determination that takes on its own obsessive momentum, like a Samuel Beckett scene staged by Robert Wilson and George Lucas.

Pallett's remarkable solo performances are a key part of why Final Fantasy first attracted notice. Using his computer as a looping station to record a number of brief musical progressions and play them back at the click of a pedal, Pallett constructs his songs in real time, beginning, say, with a rhythm tapped on his violin's sound board or a handful of plucked notes, then adding arpeggios and spiccati and finally his impassioned, slightly mannered vocals, until his performance takes on a richness and scale that the music itself can only partly account for. The effect is both mystifying and perfectly transparent: watching Pallett add each new layer gives a keenly vicarious pleasure, an oddly initiatory thrill, not unlike watching a sleight-of-hand performance from over the magician's shoulder.

This is the cultural matrix from which Josef Fritzl emerged. His case may, as has already been suggested in the Austrian press, reveal inadequacies in society's monitoring of domestic abuse. But when we place it in a literary context, it seems also to disclose deep-seated patterns. Fritzl existed in literature before he existed in life.

One day in 1971, a woman called Sarah Krasnoff made off with her 14-year-old grandson, who was caught up in an unseemly custody dispute, and took him into the sky. In a plane, she knew, they were subject to no laws, and if they never stopped moving, the law could never catch up with them. They flew from New York to Amsterdam. When they arrived, they turned around and flew from Amsterdam to New York. Then they flew from New York to Amsterdam again, and from Amsterdam to New York, again and again and again, month after month.

They took about 160 flights in all, one after the other, according to the stage piece ''Jet Lag.'' They saw 22 movies an average of seven times each. They ate lunch again and again and turned their watches six hours forward, then six hours back. The whole fugitive enterprise ended when Krasnoff, 74, finally collapsed and died, the victim, doctors could only suppose, of terminal jet lag.

Från en artikel i New York Times i mars, ett utdrag ur Pico Iyers resebok Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign.

We have suggested some modest reforms at the federal level that we hope will facilitate the development of prediction markets. These markets have great potential for improving social welfare in many domains. American leadership in this area is likely to encourage parallel efforts in other countries, speeding the development of this tool. The first step in helping prediction markets deliver on their promise is to clear away regulatory barriers that were never intended to inhibit socially productive innovation.

These ventures have a common goal: to enhance the Web with the kind of critical thinking that's alien to software but that comes naturally to humans.

Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

Google Doctype is 100% open.

• Open source
• Open content
• Open to contributions from anyone

There is also no guarantee that singing with emotional abandon that feels so right at that moment won't sound totally wrong on playback. I have this intense aversion to canned emotion, yet that's exactly what recording is: a reconstituted, canned facsimile of a performance. I am determined to subvert this and perhaps that's why I ascribe mystical/religious properties to microphones, tape machines record players -- technology that still physically touches something else. Conversely, I regard computers as necessary but heretical and potentially corrupting collaborators.

When Travis Boyd agreed to become a subject in the Virtual Iraq clinical trial, in the spring of 2007, he became one of about thirty-five active-duty and former members of the military to use the program to treat their psychological wounds. Currently, the Department of Defense is testing Virtual Iraq--one of three virtual-reality programs it has funded for P.T.S.D. treatment, and the only one aimed at "ground pounders" like Boyd--in six locations, including the Naval Medical Center San Diego, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and Weill Cornell Medical College, in New York. According to a recent study by the RAND Corporation, nearly twenty per cent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are suffering from P.T.S.D. or major depression.

I expect that history will show 'normal' mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. 'Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn't do anything? Didn't everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?'

'Yes, child, that's why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.'

'What was the Restoration again, please, miss?'

'The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.'

YP: What has the feedback been like so far from users? What do they LOVE? What have they been critical of? What do they want?

AO: They absolutely love the Blyk concept. They're telling us that free is good and ads are good. The more they can interact with the ads the more they prefer them. After all, mobile is a communication channel by its nature.

What have they been critical of...well actually, they want more communications from brands (ads). Non-targeted ads with no response opportunity (as in traditional media advertising) score the lowest. Overall I'd say that's a lot more of a positive for us vs. a criticism.

Den italienske arkitekten Renzo Piano är just nu Stockholmsaktuell med utformningen av Moderna Museets visningsmagasin för Pontus Hulténs samling som öppnar den 3 juni.

Möt arkitekten honom i samtal med Lars Nittve, överintendent på Moderna Museet och Cecilia Widenheim intendent och projektledare för Pontus Hulténs visningsmagasin.

Fredag 30 maj kl. 14 i Auditoriet. Fri entré.

I have always been convinced that the culture of sf fanzines contributed heavily to the formative culture of the early Web, and generated models for web site and blogs.

I'm still a bit baffled as to why 'addiction' seems to be such a popular explanation for perceived negative behaviour in ourselves or others. It has strayed so far from its original concept of a drug affecting brain function that it can now apply to almost anything.

I suspect it's because the concept has now been so heavily medicalised that it brings with it a concept of loss of personal control or reduction in responsibility without regard for the context or even the validity of what it applies to.

In the years since Albania's 1991 revolution, satellite dishes and air conditioners have sprouted from the sides of Tirana's buildings like disembodied ears and noses. Last year the city's artist-mayor Edi Rama invited German architects Bolles + Wilson to create a color scheme for a prominent apartment house between the parliament building and former dictator Enver Hoxha's villa as part of his plan to brighten the post-Communist city--and instead of pretending the awkward appendages didn't exist, the architects decided to incorporate them into their design.

In what will turn out to be the last few days of his life, Tesla spends his time trying to ensure that his most spectacular idea -- the death ray -- doesn't suffer the same fate (as the radio). As he tinkers with his machine and tends to his pigeons, he recalls the events of his fantastic past, memories that take him from his childhood in a small Croatian village to his reluctant retirement at the Hotel New Yorker.

'We put it on the shelf and it sells. It can be a dozen squirrels a day - and they all go,' said David Simpson, the director of Kingsley Village shopping centre in Fraddon, Cornwall, whose game counter began selling grey squirrel meat two months ago.

At Ridley's Fish and Game shop in Corbridge, Northumberland, the owner David Ridley says he has sold 1,000 - at £3.50 a squirrel - since he tested the market at the beginning of the year. 'I wasn't sure at first, and wondered would people really eat it. Now I take every squirrel I can get my hands on. I've had days when I have managed to get 60 and they've all sold straight away.'

Then, in 2002, the Minowas' 2-year-old son, Kaidin, died in his sleep. The young couple foundered and separated for about a year.

As their marriage rebounded, Mr. Minowa and his wife used their art to reckon with their loss. Mr. Minowa dove into songwriting, producing three Cloud Cult albums in as many years. He also warmed to performing as a way to let his son "speak."

• "Clustering Short Texts using Wikipedia". Fattar inte så mycket av det här, men det verkar handla om hur Wikipedia kan användas för att förbättra träningsalgoritmer för att klassificera textmängder, men jag kan ha fel.
  
  
• "Boosting Inductive Transfer for Text Classification using Wikipedia". Tanken att artiklar i RSS-flöden kunde klustras i din nyhetsaggregator är lite intressant. Lite som Google News klustrar nyheter. Problemet är att de inlägg som syndikeras ofta innehåller väldigt lite text (kanske bara rubrik och ingress). Därför skulle man kunna använda t.ex. Wikipedia för att berika texten och därmed öka pricksäkerheten i klustringen.
  
  Här har man lyckats bra med just detta, jämfört med en traditionell metod av att klustra utifrån en "påse med ord". Nu vill man se detta implementerat i Google Reader.
  

• Bokhora skriver att Uppsala English Bookshop har öppnat filial i Gamla Stan, på Lilla Nygatan 11 för att vara exakt.
• På Stan skriver om Papercut, på Krukmakargatan 3 på Söder, där creddiga populärkulturmagasin, filmer och böcker säljs. Uppdatering: stängt på söndagar, kan meddelas.
  

Hänger det här ihop?

• San Franciscos borgmästare Gavin Newsom vill att man ska kunna få sina batterier bytta på sin elektriska bil på stadens laddningsstationer istället för att behöva vänta på att bilen ska laddas varje gång. Ett slags system för batteri-byte. Han vill också att arbetsgivaravgifter (är det "payroll tax"?) istället ska bli "utsläppsavgifter", "taxing a bad thing (carbon use) instead of taxing a good thing (jobs)", som Jason Kottke skriver.
  
  
• Tänk om lokaltrafiken inte hade några fasta priser (baserat på ett zon-system), utan istället var dynamiskt och enligt en refill- och/eller betala-i-efterhand-modell. Med hjälp av RFID, Smart Cards och GPS avgörs priset för din resa i realtid, baserat på en rad faktorer (t.ex. reselängd, tid på dygnet, antal samtidiga resenärer, osv). Intressant idé, framlagd hos Dan Hill (bl.a. också om vikten av genomskinlighet och förutsägbarhet när man ska designa ett sånt system).
  
  
• I Solna stad kan anställda i Solna Business Park få ett SL-kort om de väljer att låta bilen stå hemma. DN skriver:
  
  

  Efter några månader har 17 personer valt att utnyttja systemet, men det finns hopp om att fler ska nappa på erbjudandet. Målsättningen är att få ut hundra kort i år.

Popović and Baker concede that the game is difficult. The aim is to make it entertaining enough that users will continue playing and get their friends to join in. By making the game available to anyone over the Web, the researchers expect to find people they call protein savants--people who are very good at solving protein structures and who will spend several hours a week playing the game.

Then the most disturbing part of the entire experience occurred: The professor brought in the learner and I was flabbergasted. His face was covered in tears and he looked haggard. He offered his hand and thanked me for stopping the experiment, saying that the shocks hadn't really hurt but anticipating them had been dreadful. I was confused as to whether he was in earnest or acting. I left unsure, and waited outside for the learner so I could discuss it with him. After about a half hour he had not appeared, and I was convinced that he was an actor and that my suspicions about the experiment had been correct. The report that I received confirmed that the experiment was designed to see how far subjects would go in obeying orders to administer pain to others. It had arisen out of the desire to understand the widespread obedience to horrendous and brutal orders in Nazi Germany. The report also confirmed that the professor and learner were indeed actors, although not professionals -- and I have always thought that they deserved Academy Awards anyway.

The magic word-count cut-off seemed to be 1,830 words, above which articles were likely to be higher-quality, featured entries. Mr. Blumenstock speculated that the collaborative nature of Wikipedia may force longer articles to be higher quality.

The project was made possible by the use of ground breaking printing technology that uses UV light to cure eco-friendly inks. The cement table is a sustainable alternative to using natural stones which generally involve large quarries and requires massive amounts of fuel consumption.

Twine vill bli din extrahjärna. Lägg in länkar till webbplatser, mail, textdokument, bilder, videoklipp och Twine hjälper dig att skapa ordning och reda. Twine gör det också lätt att hitta intressanta saker som andra användare stoppar in.

Twine works the same way. I spent a couple of days shoving megabytes of my favorite stuff into it, and soon it was recommending amazingly on-target links. Twine figured out that I was interested in guitar gear and hooked me up with other musicians and the things they had found. It learned that I was into robots and began slipping me cool robotics sites. It's a weird and pleasant feeling -- having that assistant do your surfing and sifting for you.

• April-numret av Seed. Temat är vetenskap möter design. Läs t.ex. samtalet med Benoit Mandelbrot. Men nätversionen kan inte mäta sig med den info p0rn som finns i papperstidningen.
  
• Tidskriften Volume, nr. 15. Massor av intressant om inforkitektur.
  

• Gulliga knappar från Cute Overload, liksom t-shirts.
• En "Wikipedia is accurate (citation needed)"-tee (via Wrote):

For people like me, people who twitched and jerked and cried out in tiny voices, cigarettes were a godsend. Not only that; they tasted good, especially the first one in the morning and the seven or eight that came immediately after it. By late afternoon, after a pack or so, I'd generally feel a heaviness in my lungs, especially in the nineteen-eighties, when I worked with hazardous chemicals. I should have worn a respirator, but it interfered with my smoking.

Enligt uppgift omsatte Manolo mer än en halv miljon under 2006. Hur mycket betalade Egmont för sajten?
- Vi har valt att inte kommentera köpeskillingen.

• Populära (i synnerhet i Ryssland; läs om hur BBC samarbetar med LJ för rapportering) bloggplattformen LiveJournal kommer att låta LJ:ers rösta in användarrepresentanter i sin "advisory board" (där "Internet luminaries" som danah boyd, Esther Dyson, Brad Fitzpatrick och Lawrence Lessig sitter nu). En representant från den kyrilliska respektive icke-kyrilliska världen ska väljas in. Läs mer hos danah boyd.
  
  
• Användarna av populära stick- och virk-communityn Ravelry samlade på eget initiativ in ca 420 000 kronor till grundarna för att göra sajten bättre. Pengarna ska gå till att betala av skulder, nya servrar, utsläppsrätter (!) och för att ordna stick-events. Som Signal vs. Noise skriver:
  
  

  Good news for the site and good news for its audience too. (There are lots of "this community is sooo worth every penny"-type comments at the post.) When you're providing a service that people are that enthusiastic for, it's ok to ask for something in return. That's what makes something sustainable.

For the Zurich windows, an abundance of techniques will be employed, including the oldest: the mixing of metallic oxides--such as copper for ruby red, manganese for rose pink, and cobalt for blue--with molten glass. (That was the predominant practice until about 1300, when it was discovered that silver-nitrate solution brushed onto glass stained it yellow, giving the medium its name.) Others will be flashed-glass abrasion (clear panes fused with colored ones which are scraped away to various results), glass fusing (combining layers of different-colored glass), sandblasting, and a traditional procedure called Schwarzlot, the manipulation of black enamel with hand tools that yield delectable names in translation: expellers, draggers, pestles, quills.

Index cards were like his laptop and text editor: portable, in that he could write in the car while his wife drove him across the Western US on butterfly expeditions, and easily editable, because their order could be reshuffled (and he used a pencil). They also allowed him to write his novels non-linearly, middle last. The fictional poet John Shade in Pale Fire composed his 999-line opus on index cards. Nabokov also preferred to write  standing up.[43FoldersWiki]

Nabokov, however, was able to build only part of the complete deck -- 138 index cards, with many erasures and much emendation -- before falling ill for the last time. Known as an artistic perfectionist and a literary purist, he left behind instructions that the cards were to be destroyed.

I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart thirteen-year-olds, male and female, as I can. Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be thirteen again right now, and reading it for the first time.

Bokförlaget Atlas och det 10-årsjubilerande Sociologiämnet vid Södertörns högskola inbjuder till bokpresentation och seminarium med en av världens ledande globaliseringsforskare, sociologen Saskia Sassen, i samband med utgivningen av hennes bok Territorium, Makt, rättigheter : sammansättningar från medeltiden till den globala tidsåldern på svenska.

 

Seminariet äger rum vid Södertörns högskola onsdagen den 14 maj kl. 16.00-17.00, sal MB503. Presentationen och seminariet efterföljs av release-mingel med enkel förtäring och vin (föranmälan krävs senast den 10 maj, sassen at sh punkt se).

Teknikhuset har anmält Axiell Bibliotek AB till Konkurrensverket. Anmälan handlar om leveransvägran av s k API:er för webbapplikationer för bibliotek och missbruk av dominerande ställning.

The story's conceit is that it is typeset like an index, apparently the only surviving fragment of HRH's "unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography", and all of the plot details above, plus much, much more, can be gleaned from the brief fragments in the index itself. It's a format that allows for some humourous moments, as in this entry, in which we discover that Hitler impressed and then disappointed HRH within the space of two pages, an arc of disillusionment that reflects the greatest schism of postwar history yet comically reduces it to just one line:

Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgaden, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181

Six lights on Olinda show when a close friend is listening to the radio, using wifi and Radio Pop, the BBC's website for sharing 'now playing' information. Each light is a button: you can tune in to listen along with them, discovering new stations via your social network.

A friend will always appear at the same light, so you can write or draw on the radio to label it, and the lights are bright so you'll know a friend has started listening from across the room.

So is the violence in this video gratuitous? Yes. But that shouldn't be seen as a celebration or glorification of it. The only people that would see it as such are those that look at it at a superficial level, seeing a bunch of hooligans beating up innocent people and nothing more. There's more to it than just that.

It is, then, very appropriate that the video was let loose during the same week that saw the release of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Uppdatering 2: Prodigy säger: "Been there, done that" (tack Christian!):

I actually find it rather disturbing that -- despite our claims to be a culture that's increasing freedom of choice all the time -- we haven't come up with anything quite as astute, subversive or beautiful as Ways of Seeing since. Not on the BBC, and not even -- especially not -- on the internet.