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Elegant Coding: Eleven Equations True Computer Science Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know
This idea is a complete rip off an article that appeared in Wired a little while ago and it got me thinking what would my list for Computer Science look like? Plus I thought it might be a fun post and unlike the Wired list this one goes to eleven. So here they are in no particular order:
BINOMIAL COEFFICIENT -
Predictions of an economic collapse in China are in vogue - latimes.com
Reporting from Beijing— Not long ago, those who predicted that China's economy was headed for a fall were in a lonely place.
U.S. economist Nouriel Roubini, widely praised for calling the U.S. housing meltdown, was dismissed as a serial contrarian when it came to his pessimistic China views. So was well-known hedge fund manager Jim Chanos. Lawyer and author Gordon Chang was derided as a Chicken Little for his 2006 book "The Coming Collapse of China."
Suddenly they're all Nostradamus. -
NEW YORK — On Facebook, people talk about births and deaths. They share party shots, ultrasound scans and deliver news about serious illnesses in a way that was unimaginable just a few years ago.
Facebook doesn’t want that openness to end, which is why the company has been trying to put its privacy problems behind it. But a big settlement with the Federal Trade Commission is once again putting this thorny issue front and center for the world’s biggest online social network. -
Study shows medical marijuana laws reduce traffic deaths
"Our research suggests that the legalization of medical marijuana reduces traffic fatalities through reducing alcohol consumption by young adults," said Daniel Rees, professor of economics at the University of Colorado Denver who co-authored the study with D. Mark Anderson, assistant professor of economics at Montana State University.
The researchers collected data from a variety of sources including the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.
The study is the first to examine the relationship between the legalization of medical marijuana and traffic deaths. -
Racist rant on London tram leads to arrest | MetaFilter
A woman has been arrested after a swearing, racist rant (YouTube) on a tram in Croydon, London trended on Twitter. Daily Mail reports with comments switched off, far right EDL member declares her a patriot to be proud of. Satire site The Daily Mash weighs in sardonically.
posted by TheophileEscargot (151 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite -
CDC: 240,000 Americans have HIV and don't know it - HealthPop - CBS News
(CBS/AP) Once a death sentence, AIDS can now be managed so effectively that people with the disease can live almost as long as those without it - but that's true only for those who get good medical care.
Unfortunately only one in four Americans with AIDS has the virus under control, according to a new CDC report.
PICTURES: AIDS hotspots: 15 states with most cases
"The big picture is we could do a lot better than we're doing today," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, the CDC's director. -
New Version of Google Maps Brings Indoor Floor Plans to Your Phone | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
Google’s Maps team has made fantastic advances in surveying and mapping seemingly every square inch of navigable ground on the planet. But for mobile users, those maps have always stopped just short of indoor spaces — until now.
Google Maps 6.0 for Android launched Tuesday with a bold initiative: indoor mapping. Partnering at launch with a selection of businesses and public service structures, the new mobile Maps version allows users to see the entire layout of a mapped building, switch between floor plans if the structure has multiple levels, and locate indoor points of interest like retail stores, bathrooms and ATMs.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
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Tuesday, November 29, 2011
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NY Times & LA Times Both Come Out Against SOPA & PIPA | Techdirt
We've written a few times about how columnists at various mainstream press outlets have been speaking out against SOPA and PIPA, showing that the story is catching on in the mainstream media. However, some of our critics have complained that since these are just writers for those publications, it's unfair to suggest that the publication itself has come out. Okay... if that's the way you want it. Let's try this one on for size: the New York Times has officially come out against SOPA and PIPA. No, not a columnist, but an official editorial, meaning that it's the official stance of the paper. After discussing how infringement is an issue, it notes that the definitions are way too broad, and says:
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I'm going to the hospital. (i.imgur.com)submitted 3 hours ago by dummystupid to funny316 commentssharesavehidereport
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A Tale of Two Call Stacks | Random ASCII
My kingdom for some symbols
I spend a large portion of my time at work trying to make things faster and less crashy. Usually the problems I investigate are in our own code so I have full information – source code and symbols. However sometimes the problems are at least partially in some other company’s code, and the task gets trickier. -
Finding a lost dog's owner with Perl and WWW::Mechanize - Perlbuzz
Finding a lost dog's owner with Perl (perlbuzz.com)submitted 5 hours ago by mpeters25 commentssharesavehidereport
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Firefox – tons of tools for web developers! ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog
One of the goals of Firefox have always been to make the lives of web developers as easy and productive as possible, by providing tools and a very extensible web browser to enable people to create amazing things. The idea here is to list a lot of the tools and options available to you as web developers using Firefox.
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communication - New programming jargon you coined? - Stack Overflow
The New Programming Jargon - Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com)submitted 16 hours ago by mentat155 commentssharesavehidereport
Monday, November 28, 2011
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How Freedom Group Became the Gun Industry’s Giant - NYTimes.com
LINED up in a gun rack beneath mounted deer heads is a Bushmaster Carbon 15, a matte-black semiautomatic rifle that looks as if it belongs to a SWAT team. On another rack rests a Teflon-coated Prairie Panther from DPMS Firearms, a supplier to the United States Border Patrol and security agencies in Iraq. On a third is a Remington 750 Woodsmaster, a popular hunting rifle.
The variety of rifles and shotguns on sale here at Cabela’s, the national sporting goods chain, is a testament to America’s enduring gun culture. But, to a surprising degree, it is also a testament to something else: Wall Street deal-making. -
Should We All Go Gluten-Free? - NYTimes.com
The singer was a no-show. The Gluten Free Expo in Sandy, Utah — one of the nation’s largest events dedicated to foods untainted by wheat — was going to have to start without the national anthem. But Debbie Deaver, the expo’s founder, didn’t have time to worry about that. The song, to be honest, was the least of her problems.
Related
Reporter's File: The Overlooked Diagnosis of Celiac Disease
Diagnosis: Hurt All Over (November 13, 2011)
Looking for a Plan B? Make It Gluten-Free (June 5, 2011)
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Mark Peterson for The New York Times
Dom Alcocer of General Mills at a gluten-free expo.
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Deaver had slept four hours in the last three days. The 34-year-old woman — who has celiac disease and therefore must avoid eating gluten, a key protein in wheat — was running on prayer and Diet Dr Pepper. She needed sleep, and syrup. -
10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop
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DrPic.com Free Web Picture Editor and Image Host - Crop, Resize, Text
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Missed "The Muppets" in theaters this weekend?* "How They Felt" is a short film co-starring a Muppet (apparently a Muppet Whatnot with custom wardrobe) that was part of this year's Boston 48 Hour Film Project, where it placed 2nd for Best film, won Best Actress (for the woman behind the Muppet) and also... "Best Sex Scene". Yeah, now you wanna see it. But be warned. Not a happy ending. It will either make you cry or make you want to strangle the filmmakers. *then it's YOUR fault "Breaking Dawn" was #1 at the box office (does not apply to non-USAians) posted by oneswellfoop at 12:17 PM - 20 comments
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http://www.catonmat.net/download/perl1line.txt
Useful One-Line Scripts for Perl Nov 14 2011 | version 1.04
-------------------------------- ----------- ------------
Compiled by Peteris Krumins (peter@catonmat.net, @pkrumins on Twitter)
http://www.catonmat.net -- good coders code, great reuse -
Three dying platforms: Flash, Silverlight, Win32 - ITJOBLOG
It is a little early for a review of the year, but not too early to state that 2011 has brought profound changes to the software development world. Although I am thinking mainly of the client, I would also argue that client and server are so intertwined that both are affected. As an example, I have heard developers moving away from SOAP web services not because of any conviction that REST is a better approach, but because the move away from Windows and towards HTML clients makes SOAP web services more difficult to consume.
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Recollect Engineering • Solving Instagram's Unshredder with Mechanical Turk and $0.50
By now you’ve probably seen the Instagram Engineering Challenge: The Unshredder and a few solutions including one written purely in Canvas and Javascript. I don’t know any company code blogs that solve other company code blogs’ engineering challenges but that sounds meta enough to be awesome, so let’s do it.
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“When you get right down to it, most security is based on the honor system.”
Here’s a scene straight from television. Two characters are at a computer terminal when suddenly intrusion warnings flare up. -
US Stocks: Dow, S&P Log Worst Thanksgiving Week Since 1932 - US Business News - CNBC
Stocks closed in negative territory in thin, shortened trading Friday as investors were reluctant to go long ahead of the weekend and amid ongoing worries over the euro zone.
The Dow and S&P posted their worst Thanksgiving week since the Great Depression on a percentage basis.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
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The Prosecution’s Case Against DNA - NYTimes.com
By the time Juan Rivera was taken to Lake County for questioning on Oct. 27, 1992, the search for Holly Staker’s killer had gone cold. Two and a half months had passed since the 11-year-old girl was raped and stabbed while baby-sitting for two little children, and with the killer still at large, neighborhood-watch groups had formed and wary parents kept their children indoors. The Lake County police had pursued nearly 600 leads and interviewed about 200 people but were not close to making an arrest when they hooked Rivera up to a polygraph machine and began questioning him about his whereabouts on the night of the murder.
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TIME magazine really dumbs it down for American subscribers. posted by Renoroc at 11:46 AM - 64 comments
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The Wipeout Gene: Scientific American
Outside Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico—10 miles from Guatemala. To reach the cages, we follow the main highway out of town, driving past soy, cocoa, banana and lustrous dark-green mango plantations thriving in the rich volcanic soil. Past the tiny village of Rio Florido the road degenerates into an undulating dirt tract. We bump along on waves of baked mud until we reach a security checkpoint, guard at the ready. A sign posted on the barbed wire–enclosed compound pictures a mosquito flanked by a man and woman: Estos mosquitos genéticamente modificados requieren un manejo especial, it reads. We play by the rules.
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recently finished reading Robert C. Martins' latest book The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (ISBN 0-13-708107-3).
Without hesitation, I can honestly say that this book has literally changed my view and thoughts on professional software developers.
While reading this book, I have been writing notes in a scrap book on things I learned and things that turned on a light switch in my head. This entry is a compilation of those notes.
I strongly suggest that any, old or new, software developer that hasn't gotten the chance to read this book yet, should take the time and do it. It provides worthwhile and interesting information on what it means to be a professional software developer. -
The Age of the Superfluous Worker - NYTimes.com
AMERICA, like other modern countries, has always had some surplus workers — people ready to work but jobless for extended periods because the “job creators,” private and public, have been unable or unwilling to create sufficient jobs. When the number of surplus workers rose sharply, the country also had ways of reducing it.
However, the current jobless recovery, and the concurrent failure to create enough new jobs, is breeding a new and growing surplus pool. And some in this pool are in danger of becoming superfluous, likely never to work again.
The currently jobless and the so-called discouraged workers, who have given up looking for work, total about 15 percent of the work force, not including the invisible discouraged workers the government cannot even find to count. -
A Jewish Edition of the New Testament — Beliefs - NYTimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO — Growing up Jewish in North Dartmouth, Mass., Amy-Jill Levine loved Christianity.
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Christopher Berkey for The New York Times
Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt is a New Testament scholar.
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Her neighborhood “was almost entirely Portuguese and Roman Catholic,” Dr. Levine said last Sunday at her book party here during the annual American Academy of Religion conference. “My introduction to Christianity was ethnic Roman Catholicism, and I loved it. I used to practice giving communion to Barbie. Church was like the synagogue: guys in robes speaking languages I didn’t understand. My favorite movie was ‘The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima.’ ” -
Home Style Dumpling
14211 Red Hill Ave.
Tustin
714-501-5432
(Everyone Mandoo Tonight--Gustavo Arellano)
Saturday, November 26, 2011
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html - RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags - Stack Overflow
You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool that is insufficiently sophisticated to understand the constructs employed by HTML. HTML is not a regular language and hence cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Regex queries are not equipped to break down HTML into its meaningful parts. so many times but it is not getting to me. Even enhanced irregular regular expressions as used by Perl are not up to the task of parsing HTML. You will never make me crack. HTML is a language of sufficient complexity that it cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Even Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions. Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide. The
cannot hold it is too late. The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty. If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes. HTML-plus-regexp will liquify the nerves of the sentient whilst you observe, your psyche withering in the onslaught of horror. Rege̿̔̉x-based HTML parsers are -
3MF Project: What's In A GIF - Bit by Byte
We sill start off by walking though the different parts of a GIF file. (The information the page is primarily drawn from the W3C GIF89a specification.) A GIF file is made up of a bunch of different "blocks" of data. The following diagram shows all of the different types of blocks and where they belong in the file. The file starts at the left and works it's way right. At each branch you may go one way or the other. The large "middle" section can be repeated as many times as needed. (Technically, it may also be omitted completely but i can't imagine what good a GIF file with no image data would be.)
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Reinventing the std::wheel - 0xDEADBEEF
On one sunny day I inserted some pretty innocent std::map into a struct, added a couple of one-liners, made sure it does what’s supposed to, committed and pushed. In some minutes I hear a scream. The damn thing crashes on a Linux. Why? It’s dead simple, it surely worked for me, there just cannot be anything wrong with it, it must work. Right?
It just didn’t. After a quick look it was pretty clear – it’s a GCC bug. Perhaps the version is too recent and it has to be crawling with bugs. I started trying other versions but the problem wouldn’t go away. Well, it’s pretty clear now – it’s a GCC family bug! That would be a glorious discovery.
We sit down together and start to minimize the example, trying to reproduce it with fewer lines of code. We are trying this and that, replacing types with simpler ones, making all kinds of changes, renaming classes, moving them to different files, rearranging the lines, etc., etc. Other people come and join us, we are three, four, five and people keep coming. Everyone’s interested, everyone’s got a theory. -
Lack of record access drives up costs at L.A. hospitals for poor - latimes.com
The emergency room at White Memorial Medical Center on Los Angeles' Eastside was buzzing when paramedics arrived on a Friday night with an elderly man slurring his words and complaining of aching bones.
The nurse in the receiving bay immediately ran through standard triage questions: "Are you diabetic? Do you have high blood pressure? Are you allergic to any medications?" Each drew the same response: "I don't know."
The hospital and doctors had no record of the man or his medical history. And with their only guide a piece of crumpled paper they found tucked into the man's pants that seemed to indicate he might have had cancer, doctors had to order a full diagnostic work-up, including blood tests and an EKG to check his heart.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
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Fresh round of hacked climate science emails leaked online | Environment | The Guardian
A fresh tranche of private emails exchanged between leading climate scientists throughout the last decade was released online on Tuesday. The unauthorised publication is an apparent attempt to repeat the impact of a similar release of emails on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009.
The initial email dump was apparently timed to disrupt the Copenhagen climate talks. It prompted three official inquiries in the UK and two in the US into the working practices of climate scientists. Although these were critical of the scientists' handling of Freedom of Information Act requests and lack of openness they did not find fault with the climate change science they had produced. -
Engineers vs managers: economics vs business
When chased by a bear, engineers want to run faster than the bear, managers want to run faster than you. This is known as “the best vs the good enough”, and is a very common theme.
For instance, company A releases a good enough technology, company B releases the best technology on the market. B fails and A succeeds, because A releases earlier, or because A’s technology is more compatible with the status quo, etc. Engineers will commonly feel sympathy for B, managers will applaud the shrewdness of A. -
Thanksgiving goes gourmet with high-end turkeys - latimes.com
By long-standing tradition, the centerpiece of Thanksgiving dinner has been purchased rock-hard, frozen and cheap.
That's starting to change. Turkeys are going Godiva.
The same passion for eating that brought us gourmet food trucks and swelled ratings for TV cooking shows has boosted demand for top-drawer turkeys with fancy names and even fancier price tags — up to $150 for a prized Bourbon Red heritage variety.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
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BBC News - Facebook users average 3.74 degrees of separation
There are on average 3.74 degrees of separation between any one Facebook user and another, a study suggests.
The number of degrees represents the number of people in a friendship chain, excluding the people at either end.
Or, as the authors put it: "When considering another person in the world, a friend of your friend knows a friend of their friend."
The study was carried out in May and involved all of the social network's active members.
Facebook defines a user as active if they have logged on at least once over the past 28 days.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
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Short guide to lazy EU journalism | Kosmopolito
The unofficial rulebook for lazy EU journalism. 20 invaluable tips for your career in EU journalism.
1. Not sure how the EU works or what institutions are involved? –> Just write “Brussels”.
2. Germany is generally seen as important in EU politics and journalists know how to frame it: If Germany is active in a certain policy domain just write something about “German dominance” and if you work for British newspaper add some subtle references to the war. If Germany is passive in a given policy area just write that Germany abandons the EU and it clearly adopted a unilateral strategy, if you work for a British newspaper you could add something about the war. -
Occupy Wall Street Puts the Coverage in the Spotlight - NYTimes.com
As police officers cleared protesters last week from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the birthplace of Occupy Wall Street, they made sure most reporters were kept blocks away, supposedly for their own protection.
Related
The Media Equation: For a Movement, a Question: What Now? (November 21, 2011)
California University Puts Officers Who Used Pepper Spray on Leave (November 21, 2011)
Loudly Protesting Park Eviction, if Not Outside Mayor’s Window as Planned (November 21, 2011)
Times Topic: Occupy Wall Street
Related in Opinion
Room for Debate: Does Congress Hear the Occupiers? (November 16, 2011)
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Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Seth Wenig, a photographer for The Associated Press, was arrested on Thursday near Trinity Church.
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But in almost every other respect, mainstream news media outlets have been put right in the middle by the movement.
Newspapers and television networks have been rebuked by media critics for treating the movement as if it were a political campaign or a sideshow — by many liberals for treating the protesters dismissively, and by conservatives, conversely, for taking the protesters too seriously. -
I'm kinda the Clark Kent of stoners. No one suspects a thing. (i.imgur.com)submitted 5 hours ago by reavercleaver to trees269 commentssharesavehidereport
Cylon woman? -
Can we lock Congress out? - CNN.com
(CNN) -- If the congressional "super committee" does not reach a deficit reduction deal by Wednesday's legally mandated deadline, I propose we take a page from the NBA owners and lock Congress out.
I'm serious. We, the taxpayers, are the owners of Congress and if Congress won't make a deal that helps our nation, then let's put a big padlock on the doors of the House and Senate -- or at least change the locks and not give them the keys.
Polls show that me and apparently 91% of my fellow Americans have never been more frustrated with the dysfunctional nature of "our" Congress. Congress' approval rating has fallen to an abysmal 9% -- to put this in perspective, herpes is now slightly more popular than Congress. Bed bugs really can't be that far behind. -
The README is a solution to a basic computing problem:
You find a directory full of files. Maybe it's a directory on your computer, or perhaps on a corporate internal drive, or part of an open source project, or maybe even some files generated by an application, open source or otherwise. The problem is: you don't know what those files are.
The README is a file, with a name like README.txt, or perhaps README.md or somesuch, which answers the basic question:
What are these files?
Or, in more colloquial terms:
What the f*** are these files?
A README doesn't have to contain a whole lot of stuff. Even the most minimal README is better than no README at all. Some suggestions are:
Say what this directory and its contents are.
If relevant, say what the files are used by.
And, if relevant, say what generated the files. -
After Law School, Associates Learn to Be Lawyers - NYTimes.com
PHILADELPHIA — The lesson today — the ins and outs of closing a deal — seems lifted from Corporate Lawyering 101.
Josh Anderson for The New York Times
Updating is needed, says Edward Rubin, ex-dean of Vanderbilt Law.
A Possible New Curriculum
What do corporate clients wish associates were taught in law school?
A better understanding of modern litigation practice, which is about gathering facts and knowing how to settle a case.
Greater familiarity with transactions law, including how to draft, evaluate and challenge a contract.
Deeper knowledge of regulatory law and the ability to respond to a regulatory inquiry or enforcement action.
Basic corporate legal skills, like how to perform due diligence.
Writing skills. Partners at law firms say they spend a lot of time improving the writing of their first- and second-year associates.
A stronger grasp of the evolving economics of legal practice, which will rely less on leveraging the time of new associates and more on entrepreneurship.
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The Paper Chase
Related
Law School Economics: Ka-Ching! (July 17, 2011)
Is Law School a Losing Game? (January 9, 2011)
Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win (May 1, 2011)
Times Topics: Law Schools | Legal Profession
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Laura Pedrick for The New York Times
MOOT COURT | At Drinker Biddle, Eric Kassab and Jennifer Kissiah, both first-year associates, in a training session. Law schools emphasize theoretical work, rather than lawyering.
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“How do you get a merger done?” asks Scott B. Connolly, an attorney.
There is silence from three well-dressed people in their early 20s, sitting at a conference table in a downtown building here last month.
“What steps would you need to take to accomplish a merger?” Mr. Connolly prods.
After a pause, a participant gives it a shot: “You buy all the stock of one company. Is that what you need?”
“That’s a stock acquisition,” Mr. Connolly says. “The question is, when you close a merger, how does that deal get done?” -
How About Better Parents? - NYTimes.com
IN recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.
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Central Bankers - Stop Dithering. Do Something. - NYTimes.com
BOTH the American economy and the global economy are facing a familiar foe: policy defeatism. Throughout modern economic history, whether in Western Europe in the 1920s, in the United States in the 1930s, or in Japan in the 1990s, every major financial crisis has been followed by premature abandonment — if not reversal — of the stimulus policies that are necessary for sustained recovery. Sadly, the world appears to be repeating this mistake.
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Google Enters Microsoft Office’s Turf with Mixed Results - NYTimes.com
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Michael O’Brien, vice president for information technology at Journal Communications, would prefer not to have the employees of the Milwaukee media company use Microsoft’s Office software any more.
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Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Venkat Panchapakesan of Google, left, and David Girouard, who runs Google Apps for Business. The service has lured small businesses, but few big companies, away from Microsoft Office.
He has installed Google Apps for Businesses, which provides word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail and calendar software, for 400 people and said he planned to “convert” 900 more. -
For Jose Pimentel, Bomb Plot Suspect, an Online Trail - NYTimes.com
The man accused of plotting to build and set off bombs in New York may have quietly escalated his plans in recent weeks, but his evolution into becoming a would-be terrorist was more gradual, according to a trail of articles and links online that the authorities followed as they say he went from thought to action.
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The suspect, Jose Pimentel, praised Osama bin Laden in posts on his blog. He also tried to justify the 9/11 attacks and said that Army bases, police stations and airports were at risk. “People have to understand that America and its allies are all legitimate targets in warfare,” he wrote in May.
Monday, November 21, 2011
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UC Davis: Official 'spin' crumbles in the face of "too many videos" | ZDNet
1970: Kent State shootings: One iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken by chance, killed by the unfathomable brutality of National Guard troops; some no older than the students they killed. One person, one camera.
1991: Rodney King arrest: An African-American man who was beaten relentlessly by police with batons, showing the cruel brutality of Los Angeles’ law enforcement and utter disregard of then societally-developing race relations. One person, one camera.
2011: UC Davis pepper-spray assault: Around fifty students at the California university sprayed at point-blank range by police, emphasising the disproportionate violence to what was a peaceful, orchestrated protest. One police officer, dozens of cameras. -
Python from Scratch – Create a Dynamic Website | Nettuts+
We’ve covered quite a bit of Python in the previous tutorials in this Session. Today, we’re going to combine everything we’ve learned so far to build a dynamic website with Python.
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Heaven Is a Place Called Elizabeth Warren - NYTimes.com
On the campaign trail in Massachusetts last month with the Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, I bore witness to acts of extreme giddiness: a 20-year-old student jumping up and down, exclaiming, “Oh, my God, I am obsessed with her”; a third-year law student of Warren’s comparing her to a superhero (“Wonder Woman wishes she could be Professor Warren”); a man stopping Warren on the street and introducing himself as the guy who recently passed her a mash note on a plane (“I was hitting on you,” he said).
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Sorry, Strivers - Talent Matters - NYTimes.com
HOW do people acquire high levels of skill in science, business, music, the arts and sports? This has long been a topic of intense debate in psychology.
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David Plunkert
Research in recent decades has shown that a big part of the answer is simply practice — and a lot of it. In a pioneering study, the Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues asked violin students at a music academy to estimate the amount of time they had devoted to practice since they started playing. By age 20, the students whom the faculty nominated as the “best” players had accumulated an average of over 10,000 hours, compared with just under 8,000 hours for the “good” players and not even 5,000 hours for the least skilled.
Those findings have been enthusiastically championed, perhaps because of their -
At Occupy Berkeley, Beat Poets Has New Meaning - NYTimes.com
LIFE, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.
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In Afghanistan, Big Plans to Gather Biometric Data - NYTimes.com
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan has many dubious distinctions on the international-rankings front: 10th-poorest, third-most corrupt, worst place to be a child, longest at war. To that may soon be added: most heavily fingerprinted.
Related
Afghan Council Supports Karzai on U.S. Troop Presence (November 20, 2011)
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Since September, Afghanistan has been the only country in the world to fingerprint and photograph all travelers who pass through Kabul International Airport, arriving and departing.
A handful of other countries fingerprint arriving foreigners, but no country has ever sought to gather biometric data on everyone who comes and goes, whatever their nationality. Nor do Afghan authorities plan to stop there: their avowed goal is to fingerprint, photograph and scan the irises of every living Afghan. -
On the Move in New York’s Thriving Tech Sector - NYTimes.com
WHEN the tech firm Yipit moved last month from General Assembly, a communal office campus on 20th Street and Broadway, to its own loft space on 18th Street and Fifth Avenue, its 14 employees simply grabbed their coffee cups and MacBook Airs and did the job on foot.
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Technology Footprint: Starting Up in New York
A special edition of the Sunday Metropolitan section about technology and New York City.
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Employees of the tech company Yipit at lunch at office picnic tables.
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Librado Romero/The New York Times
James Moran, co-founder, and his staff moving, on foot, to their new office.
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Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
The co-founder Vinicius Vacanti watching his soccer teammates play.
Arriving at their new home, they milled about, admiring the water-cooler, and the breath mints in the bathroom, and then got down to work, requiring no more than a power source and a pass code for the Wi-Fi. By the time the two guys from Moishe’s Moving Company arrived with a half-dozen boxes of office sundries, Yipit was back in business. There had already been a staff meeting, conducted while a handyman knelt in the rec room setting up a Ping-Pong table. All told, the move took about 10 minutes. -
Took a course in religious history, something very unexpected happend.. - Imgur
Took a course in religious history, something very unexpected happend.. (imgur.com)submitted 8 hours ago by akaast to atheism597 commentssharesavehidereportTook a course in religious history, something very unexpected happend.. (imgur.com)submitted 8 hours ago by akaast to atheism597 commentssharesavehidereport
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Tumblr users fight SOPA with 87,834 calls to Congress | The Digital Home - CNET News
Tumblr users have come out in full force against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the microblogging service announced yesterday.
Earlier this week, Tumblr set up a page where its users could sign up and receive a phone call from the company with talking points about SOPA. From there, the company connected users with their U.S. representatives to voice concerns about the bill.
All told, Tumblr said yesterday, 87,834 calls were placed to representatives. The average call lasted 53 seconds, while the longest came in at 31 minutes, the company said. A total of 1,293 total hours were spent talking to representatives. -
Bob Ostertag: Militarization Of Campus Police
Yesterday, police at UC Davis attacked seated students with a chemical gas.
I teach at UC Davis and I personally know many of the students who were the victims of this brutal and unprovoked assault. They are top students. In fact, I can report that among the students I know, the higher a student's grade point average, the more likely it is that they are centrally involved in the protests. -
How Facebook is ruining sharing | Molly Rants - CNET News
I'm afraid to click any links on Facebook these days.
No, it's got nothing to do with the spam attack and the flood of nasty images making their way into news feeds all last week. Instead, it's because the slow spread of Facebook's Open Graph scheme is totally ruining sharing.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
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A UC Davis Assistant Professor is demanding the immediate resignation of the University’s Chancellor over Friday’s pepper spraying of unarmed, non-violent students who were passively sitting on the ground while in the midst of an Occupy Wall Street protest.
Watch: Shocking Video Of Police Pepper Spraying UC Davis Students
“I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis,” Professor Nathan Brown writes, in an open letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. “I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association.” -
Exclusive: The capture of Gaddafi's son | Reuters
(Reuters) - The chic black sweater and jeans were gone. So too the combat khaki T-shirt of his televised last stand in Tripoli. Designer stubble had become bushy black beard after months on the run.
But the rimless glasses, framing those piercing eyes above that straight fine nose, gave him away despite the flowing nomad robes held close across his face.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
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OS.js (JavaScript Operating System) « Anders Evenrud Weblog — anderse.wordpress.com — Readability
OS.js (JavaScript Operating System)
Os.js — JavaScript Operating System
A NOTE: Yes — I know this does NOT fully quallify as an operating system. This is really just a hobby project of mine and this is the name I chose.
Simple introduction:
OS.js started out as a tool to use on my home server so i could run GUI applications to configure services without installing X and a window manager (including VNC or similar remote management) and connect from anywhere in the world just using a web-browser. But lately I’ve also found some other uses for it, mainly HTML5 application development. -
I Saw An Extremely Subtle Bug Today And I Just Have To Tell Someone | Kalzumeus Software
This post will not help you sell more software. If you’re not fascinated by the inner workings of complex systems, go do something more important. If you are, grab some popcorn, because this is the best bug I’ve seen in years.
Have you ever been logged into a site and get suddenly asked to log in again? This is one of those minor nuisances of using the Internet, right? If you’re not technically inclined, you think “Hmm, ghosts in the Googles. Oh well, here is my username and password again.” If you are technically inclined, you might think “Hmm, funny, my cookie picked a bad time to expire, or maybe my session was getting stored in Memcached on a machine which just went down. Oh well, here is my username and password again.”
Friday, November 18, 2011
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Pilot gets trapped in plane's bathroom, causes midair scare - latimes.com
A pilot’s trip to the toilet set off a turbulent few minutes aboard a New York City-bound flight on Wednesday.
During an 18-passenger Chautauqua Airlines flight from Ashville, N.C., to LaGuardia Airport, the pilot stepped out of the cockpit to take a bathroom break before landing.
In order to adhere to security protocols, which require two people in the cockpit at all times, the only flight attendant on board entered the flight deck as the pilot exited, said Peter Kowalchuk, a spokesman for the airline in a statement. -
The Face of Modern Slavery - NYTimes.com
When I write about human trafficking as a modern form of slavery, people sometimes tune out as their eyes glaze over. So, Glazed Eyes, meet Srey Pov.
She’s a tough interview because she breaks down as she recalls her life in a Cambodian brothel, and pretty soon my eyes are welling up, too.
Srey Pov’s family sold her to a brothel when she was 6 years old. She was unaware of sex but soon found out: A Western pedophile purchased her virginity, she said, and the brothel tied her naked and spread-eagled on a bed so that he could rape her. -
The Fracturing of Pennsylvania - NYTimes.com
Amwell Township is a 44-square-mile plot of steep ravines and grassy pasturelands planted with alfalfa, trefoil and timothy in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania. It’s home to some 4,000 people, most of whom live in villages named Amity, Lone Pine and Prosperity.
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Seamus Murphy/VII
Haney's children have shown signs of exposure to arsenic, and some of their animals got sick or died.
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Seamus Murphy/VII
Excavation near the Haneys' farm.
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Seamus Murphy/VII
Treatment-plant discharge headed for Black Lick Creek in Indiana County, Pa.
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Seamus Murphy/VII
Excavation near the Haneys' farm.
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From some views, this diamond-shaped cut of land looks like the hardscrabble farmland it has been since the 18th century, when English and Scottish settlers successfully drove away the members of a Native American village called Annawanna, or “the path of the water.” Arrowheads still line the streambeds. Hickory trees march out along its high, dry ridges. Box elders ring the lower, wetter gullies. The air smells of sweet grass. Cows moo. Horses whinny. -
Fannie Mae; Freddie Mac; California; subpoena - latimes.com
Reporting from L.A. and Washington— Investigators with the California attorney general's office have subpoenaed information from mortgage titans Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into lending and foreclosure practices in the state.
The subpoenas ask the government-controlled finance companies to answer a series of questions about their activities in California, including their roles as landlords who own thousands of foreclosed properties. The attorney general's office is also seeking details of Fannie and Freddie's mortgage-servicing and home-repossession practices, according to a person familiar with the matter. -
Little Black Fish: Last week, a video entitled Runway In Subway caught my eye. Filmed on the Tehran Metro, it shows a young girl named Shirin Abedinirad boldly entering a train carriage and asking passengers for their rubbish, in order to pin it to her dress.
She says: “Hello, I’m Shirin, a fashion student. I’m hoping for your collaboration. It’s the first time we’re doing this. You could call it ‘fashion design on the metro’. If you have any rubbish, I will pin it on my dress.”
In the clip, Abedinirad and friends — one filming, another collecting items and carrying a box of safety pins — meet people and their discarded items on the train. A woman is heard asking “What kind of rubbish? Do you mean ‘anything’?”
Thursday, November 17, 2011
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Austerity & Fascism In Greece: The Real 1% Doctrine - By Mark Ames - The eXiled
See the guy in the photo there, dangling an ax from his left hand? That’s Greece’s new “Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks” Makis Voridis captured back in the 1980s, when he led a fascist student group called “Student Alternative” at the University of Athens law school. It’s 1985, and Minister Voridis, dressed like some Kajagoogoo Nazi, is caught on camera patrolling the campus with his fellow fascists, hunting for suspected leftist students to bash. Voridis was booted out of law school that year, and sued by Greece’s National Association of Students for taking part in violent attacks on non-fascist law students.
With all the propaganda we’ve been fed about Greece’s new “austerity” government being staffed by non-ideological “technocrats,” it may come as a surprise that fascists are now considered “technocrats” to the mainstream media and Western banking interests. Then again, history shows that fascists have always been favored by the 1-percenters to deliver the austerity medicine. -
The Metaphysics of Morrowind: part 1 « falling awkwardly
Some time ago, I was asked by David Carlton if I was interested in assembling a Critical Compilation on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for Critical Distance. I liked the idea, but research appeared to confirm my initial suspicions that, despite its rampant popularity, reams of fanfiction and endless debates about the lore, there is relatively little critical writing on Morrowind that has survived the vicissitudes of the internet since its release in 2002. This made me sad, so I thought I’d better write some!
Part 1: Introduction
When we talk about the world we live in, we can talk about physical laws, like gravity and the rules of thermodynamics. We can also talk about metaphysics: meta being Greek for “beyond”. This is where science meets philosophy, where we might try to identify underlying principles of reality that go beyond standard physics. Theories of time and space, of causality and determinism, of the nature of existence itself. -
Why doesn't Britain make things any more? | Business | The Guardian
Before moving to Yale and becoming a bestselling historian, Paul Kennedy grew up on Tyneside in the 50s and 60s. "A world of great noise and much dirt," is how he remembers it, where the chief industry was building ships and his father and uncles were boilermakers in Wallsend. Last year the academic gave a lecture that reminisced a little about those days.
"There was a deep satisfaction about making things," he said. "A deep satisfaction among all of those that had supplied the services, whether it was the local bankers with credit; whether it was the local design firms. When a ship was launched at [Newcastle firm] Swan Hunter all the kids at the local school went to see the thing our fathers had put together and when we looked down from the cross-wired fence, tried to find Uncle Mick, Uncle Jim or your dad, this notion of an integrated, productive community was quite astonishing."
Wandering around Wallsend a couple of weeks ago, I didn't spot any ships being launched, or even built. The giant yard Kennedy mentioned, Swan Hunter, shut a few years back, leaving acres of muddy wasteland that still haven't lured a buyer.
You still find industrial -
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Occupation
Listen: Bank of America is a shitty neighbor.
To clarify, I have no beef with any specific retail banking location. The folks on Main Street (where I tread water on my mortgage each month) seem like basically good folks serving their clients in good faith. I have no gripe with them. I don’t even really have much of a gripe with Bank of America as an institution [1]. -
So you want to be a consultant...?
Or: Why work 8 hours/day for someone else when you can work 16 hours/day for yourself?
I've been a consultant of one form or another since 1985 when I started my old company, V-Systems, with a friend from college, and actually did bits and pieces of consulting as early as 1982. I have been asked often about the business, and I decided to write this up.
Please note that I am providing observations from my own personal experience, but I am not providing tax or legal advice. You need to pay somebody for that, and I'm not qualified.
Furthermore, I am not even attempting to make this a comprehensive guide for everything required by one in or contemplating the consulting business. I am purposely omitting whole areas, such as licensure, insurance, and negotiating — there are other books for that, and this isn't trying to be one of them.
These sections (except the last) aren't in any particular order. -
No More Swikis: End of the Constructionist Web at Georgia Tech « Computing Education Blog
Using Wikis for undergraduate courses was invented at Georgia Tech. We started in 1997, long before Wikipedia. Ward Cunningham talks about our work in his book “The Wiki Way.” Our paper on how we designed the Swiki (or CoWeb) at CSCW 2000 is, I believe, the earliest reference to wikis in the ACM Digital Library. Jochen “Jeff” Rick built the Swiki software that we use today, and he did his dissertation on his extensions to Swiki.
We published a technical report in 2000 about the varied uses of Swikis that we saw around Georgia Tech’s campus. Some classes were having students create a public case library. Others were have cross-semester discussions between current and past students. Others had public galleries of student work.
All of that ended yesterday.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
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Europe Bans X-Ray Body Scanners Used at U.S. Airports: Scientific American
The European Union on Monday prohibited the use of X-ray body scanners [1] in European airports, parting ways with the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, which has deployed hundreds of the scanners as a way to screen millions of airline passengers for explosives hidden under clothing.
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Frequent gamers have brain differences, study finds - latimes.com
Fourteen-year-olds who were frequent video gamers had more gray matter in the rewards center of the brain than peers who didn't play video games as much -- suggesting that gaming may be correlated to changes in the brain much as addictions are.
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US Bill Creating the Great Firewall of America | the agile panda
In the western world, China has long been infamous for its human rights abuses. Prior to Deng Xiaoping’s re-opening of China to the west in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s, these abuses were largely hidden from the West. With the advent of globalization, the PRC quickly realized the dangers of the internet to China’s fragile societal balance. Beginning in 2005, China began enlisting Western aid in Chinese internet censorship. Western companies like Cisco and Google have long abetted the Chinese government in establishing the so-called Great Firewall of China.
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On October 14, 2011, Apple introduced the new iPhone 4S. One of its major new features was Siri, a personal assistant application. Siri uses a natural language processing technology to interact with the user.
Interestingly, Apple explained that Siri works by sending data to a remote server (that’s probably why Siri only works over 3G or WiFi). As soon as we could put our hands on the new iPhone 4S, we decided to have a sneak peek at how it really works.
Today, we managed to crack open Siri’s protocol. As a result, we are able to use Siri’s recognition engine from any device. Yes, that means anyone could now write an Android app that uses the real Siri! Or use Siri on an iPad! And we’re goign to share this know-how with you. -
Salman Rushdie wins the right to have a Facebook account - The Inquirer
DIVISIVE AUTHOR Salman Rushdie has announced a small victory, the right to have his own Facebook page.
The author fell out with the social network over the use of his pen name, which takes his middle name as his first. According to a report at the BBC, Facebook had insisted that he call himself Ahmed Rushdie, but has since relented.
"Victory! #Facebook has buckled! I'm Salman Rushdie again. I feel SO much better. An identity crisis at my age is no fun. Thank you Twitter!"
"Just received an apology from The #Facebook Team. All is sweetness and light," he added.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
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How Romney Could Win - NYTimes.com
Election Day is nearly a year off and the first primaries aren’t until January, but I’m ready to skip ahead to the main event. The last serious hope of the Tea Partiers, Rick Perry, and their last not-so-serious hope, Herman Cain, are in campaign death spirals. Unless God has a cruel sense of humor, Newt Gingrich will pass like a tantrum. That leaves us with a general election between two serious and certifiably sane candidates. Phew!!
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We all have to make sacrifices (i.imgur.com)submitted 2 hours ago by sworn57 to funny140 commentssharesavehidereport
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Farmer cultivates his Hmong roots on a Fresno orchard - latimes.com
Reporting from Fresno— In a different country and different language, Pang Chang's father told him that if he wanted to survive year-to-year, grow vegetables. But for long-term fortune? Plant trees.
So in the flat, open Central Valley, where the summers burn and the winters can bring freezing snaps, Chang grows mangoes, papayas, 20 varieties of guava — some never before cultivated in the U.S. — and jujubes. Not to be confused with the jelly candy sold as movie snacks, jujubes, or Chinese dates, are honey-sweet fruit little known outside Asian communities. -
Pot growers see opportunity in empty Las Vegas homes - latimes.com
Reporting from Las Vegas— The Ballard house was as unassuming as any in the stucco outskirts of Las Vegas: a two-story box the color of an oatmeal cookie. Police charged inside one night searching for a domestic violence suspect. Instead, they smelled something skunky.
Marijuana. Lots of it.
Two-foot-tall plants fought for space in a hallway, police later testified. Half a dozen jars of buds hid in a closet. The master bedroom was something of a jungle, with two Ballard children, ages 8 and 9, asleep on the bed.
The home — with four bedrooms and 61 plants — was one of the smaller alleged grow operations authorities have dismantled this year. At another home, authorities seized 878 plants worth an estimated $2.6 million.
Monday, November 14, 2011
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After Mitt Romney Deal, Company Showed Profits and Then Layoffs - NYTimes.com
By the green-hued yardsticks of Wall Street, the 1990s buyout of an Illinois medical company by Mitt Romney’s private equity firm was a spectacular success.
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Justine Schiavo/The Boston Globe
Mitt Romney, left, with William W. Bain Jr. in 1990. Mr. Romney began his rise in business working for Mr. Bain, who encouraged him to move into the private equity firm that he ran for 15 years.
The Long Run
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Articles in this series are exploring the lives and careers of the Republican and Democratic candidates for president in 2012.
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The Long Run: Cain, Now Running as Outsider, Came to Washington as Lobbyist (October 23, 2011)
The Long Run: For Romney, a Role of Faith and Authority (October 16, 2011)
The Long Run: For Bachmann, God and Justice Were Intertwined (October 14, 2011)
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David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe
Mitt Romney cites his time as a private equity firm manager.
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Meg Roussos for The New York Times
Cindy Hewitt, a human resources manager, said she was so disillusioned dealing with workers in a Bain Capital downsizing that she left the corporate world.
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Christopher Gregory for The New York Times
Arsenio Muñiz Rosado, who lost his job in Puerto Rico, tried several times to commit suicide.
Mr. Romney’s company, Bain Capital, sent in a team of 10 turnaround experts from Boston to ferret out waste, motivate executives and study untapped markets.
By the time the Harvard M.B.A.’s from Bain were finished, sales at the medical company, Dade International, had more than doubled. The business acquired two of its rivals. And Mr. Romney’s firm collected $242 million, a return eight times its investment. -
Homeland Security Wants Mozilla to Pull “Domain Seizure” Add-On | TorrentFreak
Homeland Security’s ICE unit is not happy with a Firefox add-on that allows the public to circumvent the domains seizures carried out during the past several months. In an attempt to correct this ‘vulnerability’ in their anti-piracy strategy, ICE have asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site. Unfortunately for them Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet.
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Sunday, November 13, 2011
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The Entrepreneurial Generation - NYTimes.com
EVER since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture. The style is easy enough to describe — the skinny pants, the retro hats, the wall-to-wall tattoos. But style is superficial. The question is, what’s underneath? What idea of life? What stance with respect to the world?
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Josh Cochran and Mike Perry
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Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned. For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement. -
Computer Programming for Children, Minus Cryptic Syntax - NYTimes.com
When Howard Abrams, a software engineer in Beaverton, Ore., wanted to teach his daughter, now 10, and son, now 8, how to program computers, he thought of the fun he had playing with Logo, the first programming language he learned.
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In Alice, a language created by a professor at Washington University, the user can control three-dimensional objects like a merry-go-round or a skater.
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The Scratch language, developed at M.I.T., lets users group together tiles in the center window to direct the movement of the cat in the corner.
He quickly discovered that “Logo is pretty old school. Now there are a lot of different options.”
So he chose to teach his children Scratch, a language developed for teaching at M.I.T.’s Media Lab, both for its simplicity and the way it encourages collaboration. He uses it with fourth and fifth graders at his children’s school, at a computer club where they build games and tell stories. The fun, he said, is contagious. “There are days when I think of quitting this job and teaching full time,” he said. -
Rebecca Coriam: lost at sea | World news | The Guardian
The Port of Los Angeles, 23 October 2011. At the Goofy Pool on deck 9 of the Disney Wonder, the Adventures Away celebration party has begun. "Goodbye, stress!" the cruise director shouts. "Hello, vacation!" The ship's horn sounds out When You Wish Upon A Star, to indicate that we're about to set sail, to Mexico. It's a nice touch. The ship has just won the 2010 Condé Nast Traveller crew and service award.
I'm standing on deck 10, looking down at the dancing crowds of guests and crew. There are 2,455 passengers this week, and 1,000 employees. You can spot the Youth Activities team in their yellow tops and blue trousers. They look after the children in the Oceaneers' Club on deck 5.
There's no talk of it, but many people on board know something terrible occurred on this route – to Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas – earlier this year. At 5.45am on Tuesday 22 March, a CCTV camera captured a young woman on the phone in the crew quarters. Her name was Rebecca Coriam. She was 24, from Chester, and had recently graduated from a sports science degree at Exeter University. She'd been working in Youth Activities on board for nine months, and apparently loved it. But on the phone she was looking upset.
"You see this young boy walk up to her to ask her if she's all right," her father Mike told me a few weeks ago, sitting in the family's back garden in Chester. "She said, 'Yeah, fine.' Then she put the phone down. She turned around. She had her hands in her back pockets, which she always did. Then she put her hands to her head like this, pushing her hair back…" Mike did the movement. It looked normal. "And then she walked off."
And that's the last anyone has seen of her. She just vanished. -
The commonly-accepted unemployment figures for the Great Depression are overstated.
Specifically, government workers were counted as unemployed by Stanley Lebergott (the BLS economist who put together the most widely used numbers) … even though gainfully employed and receiving a pay check.
If we’re trying to compare current unemployment figures with the Great Depression, the calculations of economists such as Michael Darby are more accurate. -
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests | Common Dreams
I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.
The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.
