Yostivanich

“As an indus­try, we haven’t done our best to make our content-rich web­sites suit­able for learn­ing and explo­ration. Learn­ers require more from us than key­words and killer head­lines. They need an envi­ron­ment that is nar­ra­tive, inter­ac­tive, and discoverable.”

“So if we take 3^rd quar­ter growth to be more or less equiv­a­lent to aver­age Clinton-era growth, even after 8 years of growth at that rate we’d only expect unem­ploy­ment to have fallen from the cur­rent 9.8% to a still uncom­fort­ably high 6.3%. It would take us around a decade to reach more or less full employ­ment. As I said in my pre­vi­ous post, that’s well into Pres­i­dent Palin’s sec­ond term.”

“So let em cheer. Today we live in a world where a lot of peo­ple who love each other can’t get mar­ried. In about 20 years, these peo­ple will live in a world where those same peo­ple WILL be able to get mar­ried, and they will have to shame­fully explain to their grand­kids why they were on the front page of the news­pa­per cel­e­brat­ing an igno­rant and hope­less cause.”

“The under­ly­ing rea­son why smart peo­ple get the wrong answer is (accord­ing to the arti­cle) that they sim­ply don’t take the time to go care­fully through all of the pos­si­bil­i­ties, instead tak­ing the eas­i­est infer­ence. The patience required to go through all the pos­si­bil­i­ties doesn’t cor­re­late very well with intelligence.”

“In stud­ies over the years, sci­en­tists have found that it can take a week or more for the cog­ni­tive and phys­i­o­log­i­cal con­se­quences of poor sleep to wear off — even after increas­ing sleep. In a study at the Wal­ter Reed Army Insti­tute of Research in 2003, for exam­ple, sci­en­tists exam­ined the cog­ni­tive effects of a week of poor sleep, fol­lowed by three days of sleep­ing at least eight hours a night. The sci­en­tists found that the “recov­ery” sleep did not fully reverse declines in per­for­mance on a test of reac­tion times and other psy­chomo­tor tasks, espe­cially for sub­jects who had been forced to sleep only three or five hours a night.”

“Such is the case in Iraq, where the mil­i­tary there is using what is essen­tially dows­ing tech­niques to try to detect bombs in cars at mil­i­tary check­points. Let’s be very clear here: they are using prov­ably use­less anti­sci­en­tific non­sense to try to find ter­ror­ists who carry explo­sives. They may as well use tea leaves, or palm read­ing, or seances. The NYT arti­cle also has expert advice from sev­eral explo­sives and mil­i­tary author­i­ties (includ­ing long-time friend of the JREF Air Force Lt. Col (retired) Hal Bid­lack), all of whom con­clude that this device does noth­ing. Given the prod­uct descrip­tion on the company’s own web page, I agree as well. The descrip­tion makes no sci­en­tific sense at all; it claims it can detect ions from a dis­tance with­out ever com­ing in con­tact with them, and that includes through lead, con­crete, and more.”

“Peo­ple who down­load music ille­gally also spend an aver­age of £77 a year buy­ing it legit­i­mately, a sur­vey has found. Those who claimed not to use peer-to-peer file­shar­ing sites such as The Pirate Bay spent a yearly aver­age of just £44.”

“But is even veg­an­ism really enough? The cost that con­sumer soci­ety imposes on the planet’s fif­teen or so mil­lion non-human species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, blue­jeans, soy lattes, the paper used to print this mag­a­zine, the com­puter screen you may be read­ing it on—death and destruc­tion are embed­ded in them all. It is hard to think at all rig­or­ously about our impact on other organ­isms with­out being sickened.”

“Mock­ing­bird is an online tool that makes it easy for you to cre­ate, link together, pre­view, and share mock­ups of your web­site or appli­ca­tion.” Looks super nice.

“Leav­ing a web­site untouched after its ini­tial launch is, in many ways, like buy­ing a car and never chang­ing the oil or never fill­ing up on gas — it might run fine for a while, but even­tu­ally it will slow down and come to a com­plete halt, pro­vid­ing no ben­e­fit to its owner or pas­sen­gers. An ongo­ing rou­tine of reg­u­lar, sched­uled analy­sis and main­te­nance using many of the tech­niques men­tioned in this arti­cle could prove inte­gral to the suc­cess and over­all func­tion­ing of your web­site or web application.”

“It took Ignaz Sem­mel­weis more than twenty years (he died before it hap­pened, actu­ally) to per­suade doc­tors that wash­ing their hands could save the lives of moth­ers giv­ing birth. He had the data, he had the proof, but that wasn’t enough to change minds. What are you going to do when your hunches don’t match the data that’s now pour­ing in?”

“AT&T Inc. is suing Ver­i­zon Wire­less over its competitor’s “There’s a Map for That” com­mer­cials, say­ing in a law­suit filed Tues­day that the ads are mis­lead­ing and amount to decep­tive trade prac­tices.” Dumb move AT&T.

“About 300 pro­test­ers held a can­dlelit protest out­side a Glas­gow the­atre over the stag­ing of a play which por­trays Jesus as a transsexual.”

“The out­come of all seven con­tests that we were track­ing tonight appears set­tled, or very nearly so”