Yostivanich

“We’re get­ting more of the same from Con­gress, too. Reli­gion is being given per­mis­sion to intrude on sci­ence once again, with the sanc­ti­mo­nious Orrin Hatch (abet­ted by a pair of Democ­rats, Kerry and Kennedy) spon­sor­ing a pro­vi­sion in the man­gled health care foot­ball to allow prayer to count as med­i­cine. It’s specif­i­cally a sop to Chris­t­ian Sci­ence, that non­sen­si­cal super­sti­tion that believes that med­i­cine is a betrayal of faith and that wants to charge sick peo­ple money to pray over them…and also get reim­burse­ment from the government.”

“Even some­thing as sim­ple as a redesign of a web­site “for a refresh” does not get you a good expe­ri­ence. Build­ing expe­ri­ences with buzz­words and fea­tures are a drug, and if Web and UX pro­fes­sion­als don’t have a client inter­ven­tion soon, more use­less web­sites and prod­ucts are going to crowd out what few good expe­ri­ences there are. All projects should begin with this ques­tion: Do you know what the prob­lem is, and does this (prod­uct, web­site, appli­ca­tion) solve that prob­lem for the peo­ple that will use it?”

We need a hero and that hero is Sagan-Man.

“In this post we have col­lected 40 recently released free icon-sets for web design­ers, devel­op­ers and bloggers.”

“The Cam­paign for Reader Pri­vacy today urged its sup­port­ers to con­tact mem­bers of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives in sup­port of a bill that would effec­tively ban the gov­ern­ment from using the Patriot Act to engage in fish­ing expe­di­tions to iden­tify the books that peo­ple bor­row or purchase.”

“The propo­si­tion that the Com­mu­nity Rein­vest­ment Act caused all the bad stuff, because gov­ern­ment forced help­less bankers into lend­ing to Those Peo­ple, has been refuted up, down, and side­ways. The vast bulk of sub­prime lend­ing came from insti­tu­tions not sub­ject to the CRA. Com­mer­cial real estate lend­ing, which was mainly lend­ing to rich white devel­op­ers, not you-know-who, is in much worse shape than sub­prime home lend­ing. Etc., etc.”

“Swine flu has killed nearly 4,000 peo­ple in the US, includ­ing 540 chil­dren, offi­cials said after devis­ing a new count­ing method. The Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion (CDC) said the new sys­tem is based on more pre­cise fig­ures pro­vided by 10 states. The pre­vi­ous esti­mated death toll from the H1N1 virus in the US was 672. Lat­est fig­ures show about 22 mil­lion Amer­i­cans con­tracted the virus in six months with some 98,000 hospitalised.”

“That doesn’t sound like some­one who plans to ever ship some­thing of the cal­iber of Tweetie, Bird­feed, or Twit­ter­rific. From what I’ve seen of Twidroid, it’s not even as good as Craig Hockenberry’s orig­i­nal ver­sion of Twit­ter­rific for iPhone, which was writ­ten as a jail­break app before the iPhone offi­cially sup­ported third-party soft­ware. If Android hard­ware diver­sity is already a prob­lem for third-party devel­op­ers, it’s only going to get worse.”

“The drinks, which com­bine malt liquor or other spir­its with caf­feine and fruit juices at alco­hol con­cen­tra­tions up to about 10 per­cent, have become increas­ingly pop­u­lar among col­lege stu­dents. In a news con­fer­ence, Dr. Joshua M. Sharf­stein, the agency’s prin­ci­pal deputy com­mis­sioner, said their con­sump­tion was asso­ci­ated with increased risk of seri­ous injury, drunken dri­ving, sex­ual assault and other dan­ger­ous behav­ior.” Is it the alco­hol and caf­feine mix or the col­lege stu­dent aspect.

“For one of my side projects, Leafy Chat, we have just added the con­cept of user accounts. This includes the need for reg­is­tra­tion and log in (as well as log out and for­got pass­word and so on). Leafy Chat only requires an email address and a pass­word for both reg­is­tra­tion and log in, so it would be great to have some clever way to have both forms on the homepage.”

“An even more strik­ing thing, per­haps, emerges in this sec­ond graph, namely that rev­enues accrued by artists them­selves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All the blue bars in the chart above rep­re­sent rev­enues that go directly to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen notice­ably.) This is mostly because of live rev­enues, but also because of the grow­ing amount col­lected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much big­ger chunk of indus­try rev­enues than most peo­ple realise.” Record labels are los­ing the most money.

“Apple’s ridicu­lous iPhone app approval process has hit a new low, with rejec­tions for “ridi­cul­ing pub­lic fig­ures” and using Apple’s own APIs to access Apple icons. These are just the lat­est rea­sons why the U.S. Copy­right Office should approve EFF’s effort to legal­ize jail­break­ing of the iPhone—customers and devel­op­ers shouldn’t need Apple’s approval before using the soft­ware they want.”

“The mes­sage was sim­ple. Babies are good, but not too many; wait two years before hav­ing another to give your wife’s body a chance to recover. Noth­ing in Islam expressly for­bids birth con­trol. But it does empha­size pro­cre­ation, and mul­lahs, like lead­ers of other faiths, con­sider chil­dren to be bless­ings from God, and are usu­ally the most deter­mined oppo­nents of hav­ing fewer of them. It is an atti­tude that Afghanistan can no longer afford, in the view of the employ­ees of the non­profit group that runs the sem­i­nars, Marie Stopes Inter­na­tional. The high birthrate places a heavy weight on a soci­ety where aver­age per capita earn­ings are about $700 a year. It is also a risk to moth­ers. Afghanistan is sec­ond only to Sierra Leone in mater­nal mor­tal­ity rates, which run as high as 8 per­cent in some areas.”

“Do com­mer­i­cal pres­sures have a neg­a­tive impact on sci­ence? This debate has been rag­ing for so long that it usu­ally raises lit­tle more than a shrug of indif­fer­ence. That is no longer a defen­si­ble response. A new report from our organ­i­sa­tion, Sci­en­tists for Global Respon­si­bil­ity (SGR), exposes prob­lems so seri­ous that we can no longer afford to be indif­fer­ent to them. The report looks at the impact of five com­mer­cial sec­tors on sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy over the past 20 years. The dam­ag­ing influ­ence of two of these, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and tobacco, has been noted before. But we also looked at the oil and gas, defence and biotech sec­tors, which have been sub­jected to less scrutiny. We found a wide range of dis­turb­ing com­mer­cial influ­ences on sci­ence, and evi­dence that sim­i­lar prob­lems are occur­ring across aca­d­e­mic disciplines.”

“Out­side econ­o­mists and energy experts have already crit­i­cized a fig­ure within the new report that states oil pro­duc­tion can grow from 83 mil­lion bar­rels per day to 105 mil­lion bar­rels per day by 2030. The whistle­blower added that the IEA had already dropped its 2030 esti­mates from 120 mil­lion bar­rels a day to 116 mil­lion, and then 105 mil­lion. He also said that many IEA mem­bers believe main­tain­ing oil sup­plies at just 90 mil­lion or 95 mil­lion bar­rels per day seems impossible.”

“On Mon­day, the new chair­man of the Fed­eral Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion said the agency would write rules requir­ing Inter­net providers to do some­thing many of them already say they do: deliver online con­tent with­out discrimination.”

“I’ve only tested it briefly, and to be hon­est, there doesn’t seem to be a notable ben­e­fit. In IE, I can see a bit of improve­ment over the con­ven­tional forE­ach imple­men­ta­tion but only if I’m using arrays with 1000+ lengths. I think this would only be use­ful in sit­u­a­tions where you absolutely have to squeeze every inch of poten­tial per­for­mance out of your app. Any­way, it’s still pretty inter­est­ing, I won­der what other fancy things can be cre­ated by using pre-compiled functions.”

“Is Apple within their rights to reject this app for this rea­son? Sure. The bot­tom line is that they can reject apps for what­ever rea­sons they want — that’s the rule that mat­ters here. But was Rogue Amoeba fool­ish for design­ing their appli­ca­tion this way? No. There’s noth­ing in the SDK agree­ment that they’ve violated.”

“The smartest, most cre­ative TV shows, from “Dead­wood” to “Mad Men” to NBC’s own “30 Rock,” tend to be the most expen­sive to pro­duce. They have large, tal­ented casts, top-notch writ­ers and direc­tors, elab­o­rate sets and gen­er­ally high pro­duc­tion val­ues. If the changes in our view­ing habits stanch the flow of money back to stu­dios, pro­duc­ing those kinds of pro­grams may no longer be pos­si­ble. In their place, we’ll get more junk: dopey real­ity shows, cookie-cutter police dra­mas, inane gab fests. The vast waste­land will become even vaster.”

“The data sup­ports the notion that younger peo­ple are more sup­port­ive of gay mar­riage than older peo­ple. I also think it’s inter­est­ing that, even in states that we nor­mally con­sider quite hos­tile to gay rights (the ones at the bot­tom of the table), there is still a sig­nif­i­cant age dif­fer­ence: 18–29 year-olds in Alabama, for exam­ple, are more sup­port­ive of gay mar­riage than peo­ple 65 and older in Mass­a­chu­setts. So, while we like to think about states as “lib­eral” or “con­ser­v­a­tive,” spread­ing out the data by age tells a much more com­pli­cated story.” Texas is the last state where sup­port for same-sex mar­riage falls under 50% for 18-29yr olds.

“If Mur­doch wants fewer peo­ple com­ing to the WSJ.com and other news sites he con­trols, block­ing Google from index­ing those sites is the per­fect way to achieve that goal. Just over 25 per­cent of the WSJ.com’s traf­fic comes directly from Google or Google news, accord­ing to esti­mates by Hit­wise. About 12 per­cent of that comes from Google News, and another 15 per­cent from Google search directly. About 44 per­cent of vis­i­tors to the WSJ.com are new to the site, so Google is doing a good job of intro­duc­ing new read­ers to the WSJ. But Mur­doch clearly would rather have loyal read­ers than those deliv­ered by search engines. Or at least that is his story, and he is stick­ing to it. Never mind that in order to get peo­ple to pay for con­tent, they first have to be able to find it.”