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Last night I read about The Black Swan a.k.a. Nassim Taleb on EL&U SE (English Language and Usage StackExchange website). Apparently Professor Taleb wants to introduce a new word to the vocabulary of global financial collapse, antifragility: So let us coin the appellation “antifragile” for anything that, on average, (i.e. in expectation) benefits from variability. Consensus on [...]
Last Tuesday, 13 December 2011, The U.S. Mint announced that current production of one dollar coins is ending. The Mint will continue to produce a few one dollar coins for collectors, as required by law. But these will have numismatic value, and cost more than $1.00. instead of producing 70-80 million coins per president, the Mint [...]
Be receptive! Be open to each and every type of user input for authentication. Universal sign on This very-user-centric identification approach leverages the many open APIs now available for most web services. Feel free to select your user name-of-choice! @Twitter user name Facebook.com/user name user name@gmail.com YouTube.com/user name user name.wordpress.com or user name.wordpress.org blog URL [...]
REVISED 17-Nov-2011 The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is standardizing over 100 specifications for the open web, in at least 13 working groups. The CSS Working Group alone is in charge of 50 specifications. This does not include work on Unicode, HTTP and TLS. The nice thing about standards is that there are so many [...]
Part One: PDF history PDF is a formal open standard, ISO 32000. It was invented by Adobe Systems 17 years ago. PDF = Portable Document Format The image links to a pleasant interactive timeline of Adobe Systems and its role in the development of the PDF. The chronology is in Flash, and thankfully free of any [...]
Cognition seems to be the driver behind a power law relationship, which would be odd indeed. It implies a fixed way of thinking about geography and places that can be modeled statistically. Human thought processes aren’t generally amenable to quantitative models. Is this something new? Giving a name to a place is an important act. [...]
This is the first of five graphics in a series, State of the Internet 2010. All are hand-made graphics by Jose Duarte. He is exploring new and simple ways to represent information. With his handmade visualization tool-kit, he provides the technology to rapidly create any kind of graphics including abstracts maps and diagrams, area graphs and charts, [...]
Twitter influence ranges beyond measuring followers, @ replies and re-tweets. It isn’t trivial to calculate the true reach of an individual’s Twitter updates. Such are the challenges encountered in quantifying influence (perhaps even value) of Twitter users’ activity. This chart shows the percentage of tweets read in relation to the number of people followed. As could be expected, [...]
Something new and different in search has appeared. Perhaps. Zanran is an internet start-up company that hails from somewhere other than Mountain View or Sunnyvale, California. Nor is it in “Silicon Valley East”, the new incubator of technology ventures otherwise known as the Borough of Manhattan. Zanran is farther than farthest Fishkill, across a span [...]
This is an excerpt, selected by Moi, from the article Risk perception, a recent post that appeared on the Soapbox Science Blog, Nature Publishing Group. Sometimes, no matter how right our perceptions feel, we get risk wrong. We worry about some things more than the evidence warrants (vaccines, nuclear radiation, genetically modified food), and less about some [...]
Updates
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@Thales622 Precisely! You are astute. So quick on matters like that. How'd it go w/ asthma physician appt? Feel better today, I hope?115 minutes ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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@Thales622 Scary Davos pics: Daily Beast+Arianna http://t.co/P2A9jxgm Mick Jagger & eeek! http://t.co/bf7tGOGL via @nfergus117 minutes ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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@Thales622 Watch her moves @ 10:00 of same video.2 hours ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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The Power of Duck http://t.co/E0QRX44t Grow rice & wheat sans chemicals RT @tdechant
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RT @LocusCommunis Google Public Alerts « The Confidential Resource http://t.co/FKhmOEVv
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@mitchellh @jordansissel Sorry, that was thoughtless of me. To each his own.5 hours ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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@mitchellh @jordansissel Oh, not THAT! I like the song, not that yucky guy's face x6. Why do y'all want to look at him, instead of Nicki?5 hours ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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@mitchellh @jordansissel Me too! It is so uplifting! Like soaring! I have been looping it for the past 3 days.5 hours ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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@arclight 1st approval of new U.S. nuclear projects in 30+ yrs http://t.co/VbOs75DT $SO
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Visualising Activity Around a Hashtag or Search Term http://t.co/IPIumxSy + how to deal with Flame Wars
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RT @Skepticscalpel 'More on Publish or Perish' http://t.co/0fpkEeF7
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Shtetl-optimized now escalated to @IEEESpectrum http://t.co/LAHq3pPy $100,000 wager for quantum computing demo
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Ron Paul explains his views on abortion and "honest rape" http://t.co/OsrXiSoG CNN video via @AlterNet
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Kodak's 30-year Slide into Bankruptcy http://t.co/L7eBBbe5 Not just another hindsight story.
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@stratcounsel Agreed. Zynga has synergistic relationship w/Facebook. And similar share structure, the "Pincus super-class".2 days ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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@objectgroup Lisa, your @guardian data post was very good! Stood on its own but linked to method, data, alternatives. Thank you.2 days ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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Surveillance trade shows http://t.co/UAtmJXCT Which gov't agencies & companies attend? RT @objectgroup
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@LiquidBedouin I liked what I saw. Difficult to get Greece news for language-challenged (me). Site has 10+ yrs of good online rep too.2 days ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
Posts
A 2002 design by Sofia, Bulgaria-based Pravdoliub Ivanov.
[via Jay Mug]
I'm not certain that I understand the point of this, but I like the nice clean white rooms, the radiator and the older style telephone wiring. And I really like the pattern on the red rug!
I wonder how it is done...? Where is the rest of the red rug? Is it on the other side of the wall, like the small blue rug?
GeekAndPoke is my latest find on TypePad. Click through and view the left sidebar for humorous "Thoughts about the Real Numbers" (is R countable?) and a funny numbers song for children in German that even I could understand.
via www.badnima.com
Well actually, it is
I'm making some wild guesses here, but that Other category, accounting for 10% share of Yelp reviews, is likely to contain eating establishments of some sort.
A separate Beauty&Fitness category exists. That is probably how the manicure, hair salons, gyms, and other non-food related ratings in that sector are classified. That leaves room for nutritional supplements, health food stores, and food-oriented entries in Health. I think ratings of health-food related establishments are more likely than for physicians, hospitals and insurers. Remember, this is Yelp. Expect to find reviews of say, a dialysis center or hospice or skilled nursing service on Yelp? No, I think not!
There should be plenty of reviews of bars though. I'm not sure where they appear. Maybe in Restaurants? Or Entertainment? Probably not under Health!
The 23% Restaurant share is high, but even higher than it appears in this chart. Meanwhile, other categories are too scarcely populated or fragmented to provide enough coverage to be useful, with the exception of very large contiguous metro-urban areas.
Posts
Wizards, Dragons, and Dinosaurs: Classic Textbooks in Computer Science
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) also known as the “Wizard Book” because of the wizard on the book cover. According to the book, creating programs to direct computer processes is like conjuring the spirits of the computer with spells.
Middle three images: The different editions of the “Dragon Book” of compiler design. From left, the “Green Dragon Book” - Principles of Compiler Design; the “Red Dragon Book” - Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, first edition; and the “Purple Dragon Book”, the second edition. Dragons are used in the covers to depict the complexity of creating compilers.
Bottom four images: The different editions of Operating System Concepts, known as the “Dinosaur Book”. Shown are the 5th to the latest 8th edition. Dinosaurs are used in the covers I think because dinosaurs, like operating systems, can grow very huge and slow. They also need to adapt and evolve, otherwise they may be forced to extinction. :p
Best of all are the tumblr names that posted this: ixthil and the original content creator: Techie Yuckie Boy.
WulffMorgenthaler.com – Daily strip 03.02.2012
I love how one is content and the other is grumpy
Me too.
posting because i have NEVER seen pirate netherlands XD!
I don’t think I’ve seen a pirate of The Netherlands either, as I think about it for awhile. Certainly not as manga, or is it animae? I forgot the term. The tags were nice, so I decided to reblog them too.
Look down, lower left!
On Twitter, I know a sort-of Netherlands pirate, well, he’s more of a PhD candidate than pirate, but he does remind me of the days when the Lowlands had the best Armada on the high seas.
According to Standard & Poor’s, and Case-Shiller too (their housing market research partner), U.S. housing market prices are down for the third straight month, based on data through November 2011. The complete PDF with details of the latest release, hot off the press as of today 31 January 2012, is now available on the Housing Views website.
For more details on the housing market, past and future, see the Housing Views website, on WordPress, not the corporate pay wall site. It includes Professor Shiller’s monthly updates about the U.S. housing market, and on going commentary from S&P economists. I like it. The charts and graphs gallery will no doubt be of interest to fans of well, charts and graphs.
U.S. Residential Mortgage Performance Index
Earlier this month, S&P and Case-Shiller reported that cumulative default fates, oops, I meant rates(!) are leveling off, but later-vintage loans still face a long road ahead.
via McGraw-Hill Companies (on tumblr):
Cumulative default rates among U.S. residential mortgage loans continued to level off in third-quarter 2011, furthering improvements that began at the start of the year. Loans that were originated in 2006 and 2007 still have the highest default rates, but performance within these two vintages has improved in recent months. Given myriad factors, however, it’s still too soon to accurately assess whether these trends will continue. Read more.
Pay cuts are less than company operating losses on a percentage basis. Is that significant? I’m not certain. Seems like it could be, although a thorough financial statement analysis would be needed to say that with confidence.
Shareholders of Wall Street firms don’t seem to be any better off than shareholders of non-Wall Street companies.
Employees of Wall Street firms, however, are NOT suffering, not by any stretch of the imagination.
EDIT
This appeared as a news item in the Wall Street Journal nearly, ummm, a month ago? It got lost in my capacious drafts folder of good intentions though. Just couldn’t finish it until I found the right accompanying image. Now I have! Sorry for the delay.
Could this be an application of Benford’s Law for detecting political bias or worse? Maybe.
The terms weren’t obvious to me at first, so let me explain what is meant by “odd pricing”. In stores in the U.S.A., and elsewhere (the study below used municipal tax data from Denmark), prices for goods and services marketed and sold to consumers are often priced with 9 endings, including decimals.
Here is a typical example, $89.99. It is an obvious but effective way of exploiting cognitive bias. People perceive the price as $80.00, or in the $80 to $89 dollar range. It would be more straightforward to simply price as $90. The same is especially true when there is a transition between orders of magnitude e.g. from three to four digits.
Doesn’t $998.99 seem more affordable than $1000?
From the concept of odd pricing, i.e., setting rightmost price digits below a whole number, this paper advances the political counterpart of odd taxation using a panel of Danish municipal taxes.
First, the distribution of tax decimals is non-uniform and resembles the distribution of price-endings data.
Second, nine-ending and other higher-end decimals are found to be over-represented which echoes odd pricing research. It suggests that incumbents take voters’ biases into account and apply odd taxes to minimize the political costs of taxation while maximizing revenue. Attention should be given to how policy digits are arranged to exploit voters’ cognitive biases.
- Asmus Leth Olsen, “The politics of digits: evidence of odd taxation (Abstract)”, Public Choice, Springer, June 2011
Preview DOI 10.1007/s11127-011-9807-x
hello.
This happened to me on Friday! From “Zombies-are-peoples”
Is there anything I can do about it, other than hitting the spam button over and over and over?
Photographs of the Casa Mollino by Johannes Kersting
A few years ago Johannes Kersting visited the Casa Mollino in Turino, Italy and took pictures. His photographs were recently published in the magazine “Weltkunst” by the Zeit publishing house. The Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino is famous for his organic design with erotic influences. This year his work was celebrated in two retrospectives taking place in Vienna and Munich.
Hier ein Auszug aus dem Zeit Magazin von Oktober 2011:
For the German language version, click through to the post on Reign of Art tumblr.
Somehow, the confluence of disparate influences works well.
This is the URL of the photographer, Johannes Kersting:
http://www.reignofart.com/Kuenstler/Johannes-Kersting:::3_10.html
I’ve never seen triple colon’s used in a URL. Seems valid, insofar as I could tell (page loads, URL can be shortened by bit.ly, no invalid URL errors generated by any of my social bookmarking services). Disregarding SEO, I wonder: Is there any reason why it wouldn’t be a good idea to use triple colon’s? I like the way it looks.
cool blog. this guy is drawing all the buildings in NYC.
Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, the over-the-counter derivatives market was not required to “clear” transactions. This changed with the signing of the new financial reform legislation, the Dodd–Frank Act on July 21, 2010. Going forward, most OTC derivatives will be cleared through a particular set of institutional arrangements: a regulated clearinghouse. This article provides an overview of how clearing works, the potential benefits of central clearing for OTC derivatives and the optimal clearing structure.
Economic Perspectives 4Q 2011
By Ed Nosal, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently charged a man with trying to sell $500 billion worth of fake securities on social network LinkedIn.
- Be suspicious of unsolicited offers.
- The old rule about too good to be true still stands. Compare promised returns with well-known stock indexes. [Beware] of guaranteed returns.
- Tighten your privacy settings…. “Don’t you remember me from college?”
- Affinity fraud… preys on what you have in common, like ethnicity or religion.
If you’re a personal investor who [uses] the Internet, you may want to read these PDFs from the SEC on avoiding fraud and understanding your accounts.
tingletech/ead_basic_xslt - GitHub
generic XSLT 1.0 + EXSLT for EAD.
Based on the XSLT for http://www.oac.cdlib.org/
Sample output is
I tried it. I’m not sure though. I did the following:
- Went here: http://tingletech.github.com/ead-test-col/
- Selected this: …cjh.org/YiddishTeachersUnion.html
- Got this:
http://tingletech.github.com/ead-test-col/cjh.org/YiddishTeachersUnion.html
the contents of which looked strange to me. But the XSL correctly took this:
Dukacfyi Udesotbezi Xundeduip’ xyrkafuhaob tiheqy
and produced this:
http://library.columbia.edu/services/preservation.html
which is kind of cool and impressive! (Unless I am totally misunderstanding how this should work… which is ALWAYS a possibility.)