Yostivanich

“That said, there is no deny­ing that right now, Twit­ter, the brand, is the win­ning chan­nel for this new type of news con­sump­tion. It’s the Wal­ter Cronkite for real-time infor­ma­tion. And when the next major event hap­pens, an increas­ing num­ber of us will be hud­dled around our com­puter screens, watch­ing.” In here Twit­ter reported accu­rate details of the acci­dent before CNN gath­ered from the police acci­dent report.

“The law would cre­ate an online, pub­licly acces­si­ble data­base of all women who have sought or had an abor­tion, Car­pen­tier reports. The data­base would omit names and addresses but would include answers to a 37-question sur­vey stat­ing women’s race, age, edu­ca­tion level, county of res­i­dence, whether they are a state employee and their method of insur­ance for the pro­ce­dure, as well as the num­ber of pre­vi­ous preg­nan­cies, births, mis­car­riages and abor­tions. In addi­tion, the sur­vey asks the length of preg­nancy and whether birth con­trol was being used at the time of con­cep­tion. The sur­vey results would be reported to the Okla­homa Depart­ment of Health. The health depart­ment employ­ees would then “aggre­gate the data into a search­able, sortable data­base and make it avail­able to ‘researchers’ online,” Car­pen­tier writes.” Essen­tially mak­ing the per­son pub­licly identifiable.

“A com­mon pro­gram­ming prob­lem: iden­tify the URLs in an arbi­trary string of text, where by “arbi­trary” let’s agree we mean some­thing unstruc­tured such as an email mes­sage or a tweet. I offer a solu­tion, in the form of the fol­low­ing regex pattern:”

“
Con­clu­sion: Kin­dle pen­e­tra­tion is already three-fifths of the way to the cru­cial tip­ping point, where kick­ing out your pub­lisher gen­er­ates more roy­al­ties.” Crazy.

“Why is this a good idea? The Turner-Brown pro­posal is a mod­ern ver­sion of an idea orig­i­nally floated in 1972 by the late James Tobin, the Nobel-winning Yale econ­o­mist. Tobin argued that cur­rency spec­u­la­tion — money mov­ing inter­na­tion­ally to bet on fluc­tu­a­tions in exchange rates — was hav­ing a dis­rup­tive effect on the world econ­omy. To reduce these dis­rup­tions, he called for a small tax on every exchange of cur­ren­cies. Such a tax would be a triv­ial expense for peo­ple engaged in for­eign trade or long-term invest­ment; but it would be a major dis­in­cen­tive for peo­ple try­ing to make a fast buck (or euro, or yen) by out­guess­ing the mar­kets over the course of a few days or weeks. It would, as Tobin said, “throw some sand in the well-greased wheels” of speculation.”

“The gov­ern­ment of Dubai, in a blunt acknowl­edg­ment of the sever­ity of its finan­cial posi­tion, said on Wednes­day that it had asked its banks for a six-month stay on its sched­ule of debt repay­ments. The terse state­ment came in the mid­dle of nego­ti­a­tions between cred­i­tors and Dubai World, the cor­po­rate arm of Dubai, which has led many of its most ambi­tious real estate projects, but is now strug­gling under the bur­den of $59 bil­lion in liabilities.”

“Gov­ern­ment plans to roll out e-petitions across the UK could offer peo­ple a real say in the demo­c­ra­tic process, a con­fer­ence has heard. The leg­is­la­tion to make e-petitions com­pul­sory for all coun­cils in the UK comes into force in April 2010. It could result in a national e-petition scheme and force West­min­ster to take more notice of peo­ple power, thinks web guru Tom Stein­berg. E-petitions allow cit­i­zens to raise issues with gov­ern­ment. It also gives them a chance to have a say in polit­i­cal processes. ” Very cool.

“The Netherlands-based file-sharing web­site Mini­nova has removed all tor­rents that enabled users to down­load copyright-protected mate­r­ial. The move fol­lows a rul­ing in a Nether­lands dis­trict court three months ago order­ing the firm to remove links to ille­gal con­tent. The court said that Mininova’s notice and take down pol­icy was insuf­fi­cient to keep it oper­at­ing within the law.”