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On Veratect, a company based in Kirkland, Wash., that monitors health threats and Flu prediction markets.
April 2009 Archives
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"So how does it work? When a new car buyer visits the TrueCar website, they are asked to enter their zip code and all vehicle details down to the specific options. TrueCar then generates a complete Price Report with nifty graphs, displaying the full distribution of prices paid by other people for the exact same vehicle in a given market area. In addition, the web service calculates the actual dealer cost structure of a particular vehicle."
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Very cool... "A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe."
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terrific show. I'll be quoting Goldberg, "In her new book The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, And The Future of the World, Journalist Michelle Goldberg argues that granting reproductive rights to women internationally can help to control overpopulation, banish poverty and slow the spread of AIDS."
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video produced by the Democratic party
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Westboro Baptist, the gays best friend.
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"Newspapers must define their value differently - not as paper, for God’s sake, and not even as content but as a platform. But a platform for what? Content? No, there go GeoCities and MySpace. I think they should follow the advice of Mark Zuckerberg, member of the ruling junta, that their job is to bring communities elegant organization. In a sense, they always have done that; they helped communities organize their knowledge so they could organize themselves; that’s the essence of an informed democracy."
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As the Christian Science Monitor put it in their story on Monday, “The directors of the Miss California pageant condemned her answer on Monday morning.”
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Excerpt: “They called him gay and a snitch,” his stepfather said. “All the time they’d call him this.”
Earlier this month the suicide of a Massachusetts boy, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover — who suffered taunts that he was gay — attracted national attention.
He was also 11. His mother found him hanging from an extension cord in the family’s home.
In the UK she calls him names and sends threatening text messages then claims she was trying to open a dialogue. The son says, "She told me to stop being gay or get out of Aberdeen. She basically threw me out of the house." Good for the court! And good luck to him.
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The judge denies any violence. A juror on the case had to be dismissed for membership in the same organizations.
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Courts sure seem to pick and choose when copyright fits. If Google making a copy counts as a copyright violation, why not turnitin? "A federal appeals court last week affirmed a lower court’s decision that the Turnitin service does not violate the copyright of students, even though it stores digital copies of their essays in the database that the company uses to check works for academic dishonesty.
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The classic "West Side Story" is enjoying its Broadway revival. Now comes the remix, "Worst Slide Story."
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Very cool!
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"Since 80% of the video on the web is currently played in Flash, this is no small announcement...Among the initial partners: Comcast, Intel, Netflix and the New York Times."
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"The growth in support staff included some jobs that did not exist 20 years ago, like environmental sustainability officers and a broad array of information technology workers. The support staff category includes many different jobs, like residential-life staff, admissions and recruitment officers, fund-raisers, loan counselors and all the back-office staff positions responsible for complying with the new regulations and reporting requirements college face."
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Gathering Storm parody
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From a Penn State symposium on teaching and learning, danah boyd's presentation: "Abstract: Many American youth are embracing a wide array of social media as part of their everyday lives. From social network sites and texting to blogs and wikis, many youth are leveraging the power of social media to create, communicate, share, and learn. In this talk, I will use social network sites as a case study to examine critical shifts that are underway as a result of social media. I look at how inequality is perpetuated through these systems and the challenges that educators face when trying to incorporate these systems into the classroom. Finally, I conclude by discussing implications for educators."
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The two judges making up the majority decision on the panel quote former US Sen. Biden, as well as US Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Edward Kennedy (D-MA) in their 50 page explanation.
"The vast majority of us... want to and have been trying for years to change the old system to limit the time in which a petition can be filed and to limit the number of petitions that can be filed. So essentially you get one bite out of the apple," then-US Sen. Biden (D-DE) said, according to the 1995 Congressional Record.
"The proposal to limit inmates to one bite at the apple is sound in principle," US Sen. Kennedy had said.
The judges, in the recent Davis decision, go on to write that the intent of US Congress is clear and unambiguous, and that they do not want to go against the wishes of Congress.
"A lot of Democrats particularly in the 90s were on the tough on crime bandwagon. It was to their advantage...," Laura Moye...told Atlanta Progressive News.
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Researcher says media reports are overstating her claims
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An excerpt: if I ever get a chance to ask the Georgia General Assembly, en masse, a question on the subject of history, it would be: "Gentlemen and ladies, if I may use those terms in their loosest application, what the hell were you thinking when you failed to pass urgent transportation funding but did find time to pass a silly law that would have the effect of elevating the fables of Gone With the Wind to sanctified history?"
Which is exactly what a bill that passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses (AKA asylums) of the General Assembly did. The law denoting April as Confederate Heritage and History Month will undoubtedly be signed by Gov. Sonny Perdue.
Let's consider for a minute exactly what Georgia will be commemorating. A bunch of brigands, in order to preserve their own aristocratic way of life, connived and committed acts of mass terrorism to undermine and overthrow the U.S. government. If there had been a Pentagon in the 1860s, they surely would have bombed it.
More here. See also: my TMV post, Growing Old Won't Be What It Used To Be.
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Fox fueled shilling for tea parties as gallup finds "A new Gallup Poll finds 48% of Americans saying the amount of federal income taxes they pay is "about right," with 46% saying "too high" -- one of the most positive assessments Gallup has measured since 1956. Typically, a majority of Americans say their taxes are too high, and relatively few say their taxes are too low...
The poll also finds 61% of Americans saying they regard the income taxes they have to pay this year as fair. There has been very little change on this measure in the last six years...
Implications
As the remaining U.S. tax filers prepare to send their income-tax returns before the April 15 deadline, Gallup finds Americans' views of their federal income taxes about as positive as at any point in the last 60 years. This may reflect the income-tax cut that was part of the $787 billion economic stimulus plan, as well as a continuing sense of patriotism with the country fighting two wars."
A favorite excerpt: Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, said his denial is "absolutely baffling.""Whether he supports Proposition 8 now, after the fact, is overshadowed by the bizarre claim that he did not say what the evidence so clearly proves he said." [...]
"This is a major distraction in this battle for the culture we are experiencing," said Bishop Harry Jackson, pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville and founder of the High Impact Leadership Coalition of 5,000 black and Hispanic evangelical leaders. "I really respect Pastor Warren, but his stance will hurt the evangelical church. He is being politically correct instead of biblically courageous."
Nate Silver doing what he does best.
Pam started it all. This post includes the videos etc., but also Warren's beliefnet quote, "Rick Warren: But the issue to me is, I'm not opposed to that as much as I'm opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage. I'm opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I'm opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I'm opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage."
2 videos: 1 he endorses Prop 8; the second he claims he's not anti-gay marriage.
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I had water in a garbage can New Year's eve 1999 fearing the millennium bug. Now it's the credible space storm threat: http://themoderatevoice.com/27454/the-credible-space-storm-threat/ 275 servings may not be enough. And vegetarian to boot.
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My niece writes"O M G... NEW ALBUM!" She's a wing-nut. Backstory here: http://atypicaljoe.com/index.php?/site/comments/wing_nuts/
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Golfers are so weird.
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Not really a surprise is it?
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The day the civil war ended. discussion of technological advances that came as a result of the war.
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Kids don't use email anymore anyway.Contradicting what I said here: http://atypicaljoe.com/index.php?/site/comments/emails_not_going_away/ and worse, here: http://atypicaljoe.com/index.php?/site/comments/emails_not_going_away_again/ But then, email is NOT going away. Even if the kids don't use it.
Dead on...
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| ThreatDown - Robert Gates, Dog Seders & Obama | ||||
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Interesting report.
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Cole W. Camplese, director of education-technology services at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, prefers to teach in classrooms with two screens — one to project his slides, and another to project a Twitter stream of notes from students. He knows he is inviting distraction. But he argues that the additional layer of communication will make for richer class discussions. ... Still, when Mr. Camplese told me about his experiment soon after he spoke at The Chronicle’s Tech Forum, I couldn’t help thinking that it sounded like a recipe for chaos, and I told him so. He replied that his hope is that the second layer of conversation will disrupt the old classroom model and allow new kinds of teaching in which students play a greater role and information is pulled in from outside the classroom walls. “I’m not a full-time faculty member,” he said. “I use my classrooms as an applied-research lab to decide what to promote as new solutions for our campus."
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the decision was aimed at cutting the “significant expense” and the admissions office was trying to avoid adding insult to injury by sending rejection letters to applicants who had already gotten the news online.
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Should the HR departments of downsizing universities be aware of IT threats?
“Yes,” said Dawn Cappelli, a Carnegie Mellon University information-security expert who has worked with the U.S. Secret Service to build behavioral profiles of “insider threats.”
Will we never learn? "The couple said they complied, and the officers prepared to search their home. Mr. Slaughter, a six-foot, 285-pound former Marine, said he then told them, “Look fellas, do you guys realize that I’m a U.S. Customs K-9 officer at the San Luis land port?” ...Mr. Slaughter, whose family lives on East 26th Street, said he learned later that the illegal immigrant sought by the officers lived on East 26th Place. ... The officers, Mr. Slaughter said, should have checked the name on property records, “or they could have watched me walk out of my house every day wearing my uniform.”
“They bullied their way into my house — the same organization that I work for, doing 16-hour shifts,” Mr. Slaughter said. “I bleed red, white and blue. I serve my country, and then they do this to me?”
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He may still say no, but... "By certifying that his state will accept the federal money, the governor, who has opposed the stimulus law from the beginning, gets 75 more days to apply for the $700-million"
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The paper argues that many recent studies in social neuroscience — and, by implication, in several other types of neuroscience — suffer from a severe statistical flaw.
At issue are the brain-imaging studies that appear in the newspaper almost every day: studies that attempt to find correlations between, say, jealousy or gambling and specific regions of the brain. To oversimplify, the “Voodoo” paper argues that most such studies report spuriously high correlations because neuroscientists don’t adequately guard against the possibility that the brain patterns they see are simply random.
I want to know more.
The book’s strongest sections, though, come when Mr. Lih, a Wikipedia administrator since 2004, uses his inside knowledge to shed light on some seldom-discussed turning points in the site’s history. Look up the entry for any smallish American town, Mr. Lih notes, and you’ll probably be visiting a page created by Ram-man — a contributor who made “the most controversial move in Wikipedia history” by dispatching an army of robots to build articles out of data from the U.S. census. Dig into the history of the otherwise unassuming entry on Gdansk, Poland, and you’ll stumble upon “perhaps the most famous ‘edit war’ in Wikipedia history.”
A trend: "Harvard University plans to stop printing its course catalogs, faculty and student handbooks, and the Q Guide—which publishes the results of each year’s course evaluations—after this semester, the Harvard Crimson reports. Starting in the fall, these guides will be published exclusively on the Web."
Yawn. ...all in all its just a...nother brick in the wall! Part II. Part III still to come. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Brick_in_the_Wall
"What I find missing in the Mac vs. PC debate generated by the "Laptop Hunters" commercials: Compromise. Buyers with limited budgets must make compromises and they rarely get exactly what they want. The ads do show this kind of decision process, even if briefly. My laptop buying would follow a series of perceived and some actual compromises to get as much of what I wanted within a given budget.... I spent more to get a Windows laptop than I would have for a good-enough Mac notebook. Other criteria mattered more than price."
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cool pics
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For all my math friends
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nearly: US 8.5, France 8.8 (estimate)
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"Finally, there's the political calculus of how this will impact the Iowa GOP caucus in 2012. The ninja-like Mitt Romney is already out of the gate on this one, telling Chris Cillizza, "I believe marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman and the definition of marriage should be left to the people and not to activist courts." No word yet from Palin, Sanford, Jindal or Huckabee (who won Iowa in 2008). But it looks like Iowa 2012 could become a five way race to the top of homophobia hill, and since nationwide, voters of all persuasions rank gay marriage below the economy, war, terrorism, taxes and healthcare--whoever makes it there first will face a long drop later. That's good news."
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The 10.31 Project | ||||
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Colbert is brilliant. Beck is so out there that on his show yesterday, no less a conservative eminence than Bill O'Reilly seemed to be openly mocking Beck's notion of the government "slowly drifting into fascism."
Via Steve Benen, "When, on Fox News, Bill O'Reilly serves as the voice of reason, it's safe to say the network has reached a scary place."
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My TMV roundup of links and link roundups on the Iowa gay marriage decision.
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AMAZING!!! Silver runs the numbers and gives a state-by-state prediction on when marriage bans fail. "The model predicts that by 2012, almost half of the 50 states would vote against a marriage ban, including several states that had previously voted to ban it. In fact, voters in Oregon, Nevada and Alaska (which Sarah Palin aside, is far more libertarian than culturally conservative) might already have second thoughts about the marriage bans that they'd previously passed." By 2016 even Georgia's ban is in trouble.
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Dale Carpenter, "This is the third pro-SSM state supreme court decision in the past year. In addition to the important marriage result, the decision is notable because it continues a growing trend among state courts to treat sexual-orientation classifications as suspect. If it continues, that trend will have consequences on gay-rights questions well beyond the marriage context. State judiciaries are beginning to follow a familiar pattern of hastening civil-rights progress for a group once that group's cause has achieved a measure of legislative success and cultural acceptance.... I can see two simultaneous effects from this: (1) rising expectations among gay couples in the Midwest combined with more political pressure to enact domestic partnerships and civil unions, especially in Illinois, and (2) rising alarm and political organizing among gay-marriage opponents in those same states."
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This post summarizes the Iowa Supreme Court marriage decision in Varnum v. Brien....The sanctity of all religious marriages celebrated in the future will have the same meaning as those celebrated in the past. The only difference is civil marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more complete understanding of equal protection of the law.
A glitch kept my TMV Twitter post on the Google rumors from going up until today. It's here.
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Technologizer's Harry McCracken, a nonpartisan in this fight, runs a regular series that factors this in when comparing Apples with PCs. He picks a sample Mac system, then prices out what rival computers would cost if outfitted with the same features. In October, he found that Apple's new 13-inch aluminum MacBook—which sells for $1,299—was right around the same price as similarly equipped machines by Lenovo and Sony, though more expensive than a machine made by Dell.
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"we can work to build collective solutions, neighborhood watches in cyberspace. Right now each PC has a metaphorically autistic experience: It surfs from one site to the next with no awareness of what other PC’s are doing. Imagine having a little software on your PC that reports its vital signs to other participating PC’s. Collectively we could generate a map of the health of cyberspace, an early-warning system — and a means of answering some very useful questions. Before running new code, you could say: How many machines in the herd are running it? How many self-proclaimed experts run it, versus neophytes like me? Is the code brand new, or has it been around for months or years? These questions are not beyond the expertise of most PC users, and the answers can help them make much more informed decisions about what code to run."
Apparently he didn't get the job. The Bilerico Project says he wuz robbed:
He made the video to apply for the "Island Reef Job" caretaking the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Obviously, it's a tourism related promotion, but this guy put so much work into his video he should have won automatically. A musical? What can top a musical?
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JOe the Plumber in my hometown, "When Keystone Progress tried to get some answers from Joe at the rally in Harrisburg, Joe came up empty, admitting that he doesn't know shit about anything." video
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with audio
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links to conservative support for locavore sustainable food policies
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Hopefully the cat's out of the bag. If they succeed and keep their content locked up that just gives the freebies less competition. It's definitely not about giving viewers what they want -- not online but on demand on tv, "Another trend that terrifies television networks and distributors is the prospect that Web video will move from the PC to the television itself. Products intended to bridge that gap, like the Apple TV set-top box and the Roku digital video player, are now used by only a small percentage of people but could become more popular."
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From a friend. I continue to find it reprehensible that way say we don't want to impoverish the next generation through social security taxes but we're happy to let them go into huge, government subsidized bank debt when they are typically not yet financially savvy enough to understand the consequences.
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The definitive collection. Wonderfully comprehensive;
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I'm convinced. First there was the student endorsement (they showed me the custom url option). And I find this argument convincing. "Semantic indexing of the web through casual but opt-in and common user activity is a great strategy."
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Metrics as business model. First Twitter. Now bit.ly: "A number of people have looked at today's news and thought it was ridiculous that a link shortening business could raise $2 million in funding. We don't think it's ridiculous at all. Show us a service that can report in real time how many people are visiting millions of pages around the web and what those pages are about, that exposes that data in an API, and we'll show you a platform we're very excited to see work."
Ads 'n Such
Love them...
