Clive Thompson on Why Urban Farming Isn't Just for Foodies (9)
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Clive Thompson (180)
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Wired Top Stories (4760)
16 hours, 35 minutes
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This year, Carol Nissen's crops include mesclun, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, and assorted herbs. When she sits down to dine, she's often eating food grown with her own two hands. But Nissen isn't tilling the soil on a farm. She's a Web designer who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey — one of the most cramped, concrete-laden landscapes in the nation. Nissen's vegetables thrive in pots and boxes crammed into her house and in wee plots ...
The Internet Gets a New Command Line With Firefox's Ubiquity (17)
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Michael Calore (60)
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webmonkey (468)
1 day, 4 hours
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Mozilla launched a new experimental browser plug-in Tuesday that has the power to change the way people interact with the dozens of web services they use every day. The project, called Ubiquity, is an open-source extension to the Firefox web browser. To start testing it out, grab the prototype add-on, a free download for all platforms, from Mozilla Labs. Ubiquity is basically an attempt to build an easy-to-grasp user interface for the open web at ...
The failure of open science (7)
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josé (45)
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Academic Productivity (22)
1 day, 5 hours
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Michael Nielsen has a great post on why open science is failing to take off. His main point is that science was never that open to start with, but thanks to the communication needs of the time and the technology available people developed the peer review system. A system that is now hauting us, while top scientists disregard current technology (mostly web-based) that makes the current system look silly. By the way, Nielsen knows what ...
If You Had The 'Secret' To Winning The Lottery, Would You Patent It? (6)
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Michael Masnick (1599)
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Techdirt (1882)
2 days, 10 hours
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Okay, so this story is bizarre enough by itself, but there's an odd twist at the end. A husband and wife who held four separate winning lottery tickets claims to have figured out a secret formula for winning the lottery. That seems highly unlikely, of course. There is no formula that can predict totally independent numbers. The four winning tickets all used the same numbers, so there's no proof that the couple did anything other ...
Some things our critics don't get (1)
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Dennis Fermoyle (2)
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From the Trenches of Public Ed. (2)
3 days, 13 hours
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Rather than writing posts the last few days, I've been spending more time reading other blogs and leaving comments on them. As usual, there have been a number of posts involving "choice" and charter schools. I ended up spending a fair amount of time going back and forth with people on a post by Joanne Jacobs saying that blacks do better in charter schools. Anyone who has read a few of my posts knows that ...
The Ectomorphs (1)
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4 days, 2 hours
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Running is strange. There are so many different flavors of it, but the big divide is between sprinters and distance runners. They're almost like two different species. The Olympics are putting that on display. On the one hand is Usain Bolt, an absolutely transcendent talent in the 100m and 200m. I can't believe how fast the guy is. Like many, I cringed a bit when he started showboating at the end of the 100m. But ...
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sumidiot said:
The NYT article, linked as 'no style points' is also interesting
Using email as OpenID (5)
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Chris Saad (29)
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Paying Attention (29)
5 days, 3 hours
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One of the most common comments/questions I get while talking about data portability is ‘The OpenID User Experience sucks - how do we make it more user friendly?’. The problem is two fold. First, users do not understand why they need to provide a URI to log in. Second, users get confused by bouncing around to a 3rd party site. I’ve given a lot of thought to this problem. The only answer I’ve had so ...
McNamara's Syndrome: Being Late To The Game On An Internet Meme (3)
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5 days, 15 hours
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Last week, Network World columnist Paul McNamara had an amusing post about some jittery Circuit City execs who had demanded that all stores destroy copies of Mad Magazine, after it made fun of Circuit City. While, Circuit City actually showed it had a pretty decent sense of humor in apologizing for the trigger happy exec who demanded the destruction of the magazines, the situation gave McNamara a chance to mention The Streisand Effect -- the ...
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sumidiot said:
Do you have McNamara's Syndrome? Do I?
The First Step Is For Microsoft To Admit It Has A Problem (13)
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Tom Lee (30)
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Techdirt (1882)
6 days, 1 hour
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Ars Technica brings word of a pair of interesting efforts underway over at the Mozilla Project -- both aimed at improving Internet Explorer, whether Microsoft likes it or not. You may have heard of the first one already: ScreamingMonkey has gotten some press. It aims to make the core of Firefox's next-generation Javascript engine (originally developed by Adobe) available in IE, providing advantages in speed and standards-compliance. The other project is a bit more recent, ...
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David said:
Broken markets suck....
Betchablog » Blog Archive » The Truth is Out There-Chris Betcher blog (2)
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1 week
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The school at which I teach, PLC Sydney, was in the news this morning regarding a recent assessment task conducted by one of our Year 9 English classes. The article from the Sydney Morning Herald talks about how this class is pushing the “open book exam” concept into allowing students to use resources that take them beyond the boundaries of the classroom and enable them to draw on outside sources - the web, other books, ...
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sumidiot said:
I'm ready for these sorts of changes in my calc classes. I bet my students are too. It's sad that it's so much easier to just go off "last year's notes" - themselves a near replica of notes from all the years past.
The Hidden Complexity of the Olympics (20)
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Sean (244)
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Cosmic Variance (193)
1 week, 1 day
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Chad laments that we don’t hear that much about the decathlon any more, because Americans aren’t really competitive. I also think it’s a shame, because any sport in which your score can be a complex number deserves more attention. Yes, it’s true. The decathlon combines ten different track and field events, so to come up with a final score we need some way to tally up all of the individual scores so that each event ...
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HacKnight said:
Great summary of the math behind the Decathlon. Or at least a way to make the math look rather silly if you run a 100-second 100 meter dash.
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Matthew said:
Math geekery about Olympic Scoring is fun.
The Critics Need a Reboot. The Internet Hasn't Led Us Into a New Dark Age. (20)
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David Wolman (21)
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Wired: Culture (38)
1 week, 2 days
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When in doubt, blame the latest technology. Socrates thought the advent of writing would wreak havoc on the powers of the mind. Christian theologians denounced the printing press as the work of the devil. The invention of the telephone was supposed to make letter-writing extinct, and the arrival of the train — and later the car and plane — was going to be the death of community. Now comes a technological bogeyman for the 21st ...
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Piotr O said:
I hit 'share' on this 5 times.
How to lose inches without even trying. (1)
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Ξ (2)
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360 (2)
1 week, 2 days
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I was just looking over this morning’s paper, and reading the story “Russian champion disses Jenn” about how pole valuter Yelena Isinbayeva was pretty sure that she was going to win the gold [which she did later today], and that Jenn Stuczynski was unlikely to surpass her. The third paragraph in the story read: Asked if she was annoyed by media suggestions that Stuczynski was a challenger after her U.S. record vault of 16 feet, ...
Pythagorean triples (4)
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Alexandre Borovik (30)
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Mathematics under the Microscope (30)
1 week, 2 days
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Yet another old post moved here for convenience of working on a text I am currently writing. **** My friend and colleague Hovik explained to me the right way of solving the classical Pythagorean Triples Equation x2 + y2 = z2 in integers. Of course, after change of variables u = x/z, v = y/z we have to solve a slightly simpler equation u2 + v2 = 1 in rational numbers u and v. Then ...
Covering Up Any Brand In Beijing That Hasn't Paid To Sponsor The Olympics (24)
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Michael Masnick (1599)
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Techdirt (1882)
1 week, 2 days
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Every time you think that the Olympics' bizarre obsession with extra-ordinary protections on intellectual property took a step beyond ridiculous, you were probably just underestimating the International Olympic Committee, who will just keep going further and further. You may recall the efforts put forth by the IOC to get special trademarks on certain words, like 2010 and Vancouver and 2012 and London, since that's where the next two Olympics will take place. While it seems ...
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sumidiot said:
Ridamndiculous
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Srivatsn said:
this is funny :)
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Rob said:
no really, this is a good thing - who wants to risk buying a non-official toilet? My oh my.
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Db0 said:
The Chinese Olympics are getting more and more ridiculous. IOC founds its perfect mate in the Totalitarian regime of China, which just goes to show what they expect from the rest of the world.
RIAA May Get Its Wish: Pandora Leaning Towards Shutting Down (7)
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Michael Masnick (1599)
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Techdirt (1882)
1 week, 2 days
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Last year, we noted that the new webcasting royalty rates pushed through by the RIAA appeared designed specifically to kill internet radio. These royalties are different and much higher than things like traditional and satellite radio, despite being much more fragile at this point in their development. As if to prove the point, Pandora, one of the largest and most successful online streaming radio providers is now saying that it's going to have to shut ...
The Perils of FUI: Fake User Interface (58)
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Jeff Atwood (1167)
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Coding Horror (2204)
1 week, 2 days
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As a software developer, tell me if you've ever done this: Taken a screenshot of something on the desktop Opened it in a graphics program Gone off to work on something else Upon returning to your computer, attempted to click on the screenshot as if it was an actual program. And let's not forget the common goating technique where you take a screenshot of someone's desktop, make it the desktop background, then proceed to hide ...
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andrin said:
Things like this will probably become everyday news in the future. Most website owners and even many developers are clueless to this phenomena.
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jmvidal said:
Clever, and scary.
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fmavituna said:
http://ferruh.mavituna.com/firefox-master-password-dialog-weakness-oku/
Freebase Parallax: Browsing ad infinitum (1)
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1 week, 3 days
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Just recently an inspiring new user interface came out, which gives users an idea, that “googling” the web isn´t the ultimate way to find information on the web: Freebase Parallax by David Huynh. David was also strongly involved in some projects of CSAIL at MIT which also dealt with the “simple” question: How to make (web) data more accessible for users who aren´t aware of SPARQL, SQL or OLAP cubes. For example, Exhibit became a ...
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sumidiot said:
Click the Freebase Parallax link, and watch the video. Wonderful stuff.
Sunday reading: Editorial on high textbook prices (1)
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Robert (314)
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Casting Out Nines (12)
1 week, 3 days
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The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette has this article today by Karen Francisco which is an excellent, if troubling, survey of the problem of rising textbook costs and the things people are doing to offset those costs. I was interviewed by Ms. Francisco last week for this article, and I am happy to say that unlike in my previous newspaper interview experience, she got my comments exactly right (and asked if my name and position could appear ...
