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Anis Shivani ° What Should Be the Function of Criticism Today? ° Subtropics
The premise of this essay is that criticism needs to play a central role in the revival of literature. At present, criticism, in the form of academic “theory,” is in the curious position of simultaneous self-exaltation and self-marginalization, being a highly esoteric affair that makes no effort to reach the mass of readers. For much of the history of literary criticism, writer-critics, especially poet-critics, have been the most important figures—Dryden, Sidney, Shelley, Coleridge, Eliot, Tate, Jarrell, to name just a few. Two things have happened since the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century to make this breed all but extinct.
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Entertainment - Scott Meslow - 'Game of Thrones' and the Problem of Pretending - The Atlantic
On the season finale, the characters struggle to conceal who they really are.
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- A powerful platform to help surface more content and conquer all of your digital and social strategy needs.
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Wednesday, June 6, 2012
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Monday, June 4, 2012
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Sept. 11 Memorial Museum’s Fraught Task - To Tell the Truth. - NYTimes.com
It seemed self-evident at the time: A museum devoted to documenting the events of Sept. 11, 2001, would have to include photographs of the hijackers who turned four passenger jets into missiles. Then two and a half years ago, plans to use the pictures were made public.
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With those concerns in mind, curators reviewed hundreds of recordings. The family of Betty Ong, the flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the north tower, for example, gave the museum a tape of her calmly informing ground control of the terror transpiring around her.
“It’s the most remarkable demonstration of professionalism under duress that I think anyone will ever hear, and they wanted us to include it because they felt it said so much about who she was,” Ms. Greenwald said.
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We Only Think We Know the Truth About Salt - NYTimes.com
Oakland, Calif.
THE first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. All I knew was that I had played high school football in suburban Maryland, sweating profusely through double sessions in the swamplike 90-degree days of August. Without salt pills, I couldn’t make it through a two-hour practice; I couldn’t walk across the parking lot afterward without cramping. -
Single motherhood's rise an economic disaster for women - latimes.com
The single-mother revolution shouldn't need much introduction. It started in the 1960s when the nation began to sever the historical connection between marriage and childbearing and to turn single motherhood and the fatherless family into a viable, even welcome, arrangement for children and for society. The reasons for the shift were many, including the sexual revolution, a powerful strain of anti-marriage feminism and a "super bug" of American individualism that hit the country in the 1960s and '70s.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
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“Headhunter” explains why USA high-tech industry is declining
The United States has lost 28% of its jobs in high tech since its peak in 2000, claims a study released recently by the National Science Board. This means 687,000 positions have been lost. Why has this happened?
I’ve lived near Silicon Valley for three decades. I’ve always regarded the high-tech hub as a permanent dynamo in the USA economy, an employment source for it’s citizens, and ground zero for the future’s scientific breakthroughs. Imagine my surprise when I queried a “headhunter” recently who informed me that times-are-a’-changing; high-tech is migrating to Asia, and why be surprised? A huge percent of SV jobs are already filled by immigrants from that continent… -
Violence in Chicago - chicagotribune.com
Ten people were killed and 42 others were wounded in shootings over the Memorial Day weekend. In Baghdad? Basra? Kabul? Kandahar?
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The Middle Seat: The Airlines' Squeaky Wheels Turn to Twitter - Bing Travel
The Middle Seat: The Airlines' Squeaky Wheels Turn to Twitter
Saturday, June 2, 2012
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Mobile Opportunity: Fear and Loathing and Windows 8
I was very excited when I saw the first demos of Windows 8. After years of settling for mediocre incremental improvements in its core products, Microsoft finally was ready to make bold changes to Windows, something I thought it had to do to stay relevant in computing. What's more, the changes looked really nice! Once I'd seen the clean, modern-looking videos of Windows 8, the old Windows looked cramped and a little embarrassing, kind of like finding a picture of the way you dressed when you were a senior in high school (link).
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Barack Obama Directs All Federal Agencies to Have an API @ API Evangelist
As a follow-up to the Executive Order 13571 issued on April 27, 2011, requiring executive departments and agencies to identify ways to use innovative technologies to streamline their delivery of services to lower costs, decrease service delivery times, and improve the customer experience--Barack Obama has directed federal agencies to deploy Web APIs.
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U.S., Long Engaged in Cyberwar Against Iran, Has Now Declared It - IEEE Spectrum
Just a week ago, the Flame virus, suspected to be a weapon in a heretofore undeclared cyberwar, was discovered by computer security experts. Now, unnamed U.S. government officials have told a New York Times reporter that the Stuxnet worm, another sophisticated piece of malware that was discovered in 2010, was the brainchild of secretive U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. Stuxnet, designed to deliver information about Iran’s uranium enrichment program and subsequently hamper it, was clearly a cyberwarfare tool. But previous discussions of its authorship were, at best, a series of educated guesses and unverified allegations.
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Reminder To Congress: Cops' Cellphone Tracking Can Be Even More Precise Than GPS - Forbes
In the wake of a historic Supreme Court ruling that police can’t use GPS devices planted on a car to track suspects without a warrant, Congress is reconsidering the question of what kinds of location tracking constitute an invasion of privacy. And one privacy and computer security professor wants to remind them that the gadget we all carry in our pockets can track us more precisely than any device merely attached to our car–even without the use of GPS.
Friday, June 1, 2012
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Model Behavior – The New Inquiry
Model Behavior: A Laurie Penny essay on gender presentation, anorexia, neoliberalism, capitalism, queerness, gender, drag, media, America's Next Top Model, and a few other things.
posted by latkes at 10:06 AM - 35 comments (26 new) +
"Gender determines the shape of our fantasies. Good little boys are supposed to dream about changing the world, but good little girls are supposed to dream about changing ourselves. From the first time we open a book of fairy tales, we learn that beauty is destiny, and when we grow up, we’re told that this destiny is ours to command. If we can consume wisely enough to be beautiful and fashionable, we can transform everything about ourselves." -
Go Get Windows 8 | John C. Dvorak | PCMag.com
The world was treated to a minor fiasco when various Microsoft blogs posts told of the availability of the newest Windows 8 download, the Release Preview. You can look around for it but my advice is to download an ISO image here, then burn it onto a DVD and go from there. The direct download site actually tries to download Windows 8 onto your actual machine, which I do not recommend. You should put this on a sandbox or other machine, not the one you use daily.
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Engineers-Excel.com: Little Man Computer
This tool shows the working of a computer CPU using the Little Man Computer Model (LMC).
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How a trio of hackers brought Google’s reCAPTCHA to its knees | Ars Technica
Hackers exploit weaknesses in Google's bot-detection system with 99% accuracy.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
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Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: -2000 Lines Of Code
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Date: February 1982
Characters: Bill Atkinson
Topics: Software Design, Management, Lisa
Summary: It's hard to measure progress by lines of code
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Authors@Google: Kyle Johnson 'Inception and Philosophy' - YouTube
"The question of whether or not Cobb's top falls doesn't really matter." Kyle Johnson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, gives a detailed, multi-layered analysis of Inception as part of Authors@Google talks. Very insightful and interesting, even if you think he's dead wrong.
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(CBS) - When Ohio emergency room physician Dr. Howard Mell heard that Rudy Eugene, the man who allegedly chewed another man's face off in Miami over the weekend, might have been high at the time on a synthetic stimulant known on the street as "bath salts," he wasn't terribly surprised: in the past year, Mell says seven people - all under age 27 - have died in the two Cleveland-area hospitals where he works after using "bath salts."
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20 lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time - Steve Hanov's Programming Blog
A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger buttons and slightly different copy. After a while, take a look at the stats and figure out which group presses the button more often. Sounds good, right? The problem is staring you in the face. It is the same dilemma faced by researchers administering drug studies. During drug trials, you can only give half the patients the life saving treatment. The others get sugar water. If the treatment works, group B lost out. This sacrifice is made to get good data. But it doesn't have to be this way.
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The Design of LLVM | Dr Dobb's
In the last five years, LLVM has evolved from an academic project to the universal back-end of C, C++, and Objective C compilers. The key to its success is its performance and adaptability, both of which derive from its unique design and implementation.
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How Facebook's Timeline is like genital herpes | Technically Incorrect - CNET News
A film that spoofs the TV ads for Valtrex shows how Facebook's Timeline tries to dominate your life. But you can manage it. No, really. You can.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
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Introduction by Sam Harris
I recently wrote two articles in defense of "profiling" in the context of airline security (1 & 2), arguing that the TSA should stop doing secondary screenings of people who stand no reasonable chance of being Muslim jihadists. I knew this proposal would be controversial, but I seriously underestimated how inflamed the response would be. Had I worked for a newspaper or a university, I could well have lost my job over it. -
Logout before you burnout : Coding Ninja
Burnout amongst software engineers is a real danger. Years ago when I had first heard about “burnout” I brushed it off as a myth. After seeing it first hand and experiencing a little burnout myself, I can attest it is indeed real.
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The victim of the vicious attack has been identified as 65-year-old Ronald Poppo, who remains in critical condition at Ryder Trauman Center.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
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What are the tax implications of the zombie apocalypse?
The only certainties in life are death and taxes, but how do you handle the taxes when death doesn't go quite as planned? Law professor Adam Chodorow takes a stab at estate planning for the undead in perhaps the only legal paper to cite both the Internal Revenue Code and Weekend at Bernie's II.
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The original Guild Wars turned the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) subscription model on its head in 2005. Up until that point, the standard practice across all MMOs, such as EverQuest, Lineage II, Final Fantasy XI, and World of Warcraft, to name just a few, required a monthly subscription between $10 and $20 to keep playing the game on top of the $40 to $60 already spent on just buying the retail package. Guild Wars dropped the subscription model all together, instead offering a comparable triple-A experience at a fraction of the price.
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“Incredibly sophisticated” cyber war tool unveiled today, hitting the Middle East | VentureBeat
An extremely complex virus infecting computers in the Middle East called Flame was made public today, and is likened to the Stuxnet virus, which attacked Iranian nuclear systems in 2010.
Monday, May 28, 2012
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Voyager FAQ - The Interstellar Mission
Question: What kind of computers are used on the Voyager spacecraft?
Answer: There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft and there are two of each kind. Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K.
Computer Command System (CCS) - 18-bit word, interrupt type processors (2) with 4096 words each of plated wire, non-volatile memory.
Flight Data System (FDS) - 16-bit word machine (2) with modular memories and 8198 words each
Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS) - 18-bit word machines (2) with 4096 words each.
According to my calulations, that's a total of about 68KB, or small potatoes compared to today's microprocessors. We probably could perform all functions with one of today's boards and still have room for solid state data storage and much more fault detection software. We would still need a second unit for redundancy. Today's microprocessors are also much faster than the chips used on Voyager and a comparative system would use less electrical power. On the other hand, software might be more complicated as opposed to that used in an interrupt type system, but it would be much more capable and more flexible.
Let's look closer at the CCS. The CCS has two main functions: to carry out instructions from the ground to operate the spacecraft, and to be alert for a problem or malfunction and respond to it. Two identical 4096- word memories contain both fixed routines (about 2800 words) and a variable section (about 1290 words) for changing science sequences. The CCS issues commands to the AACS for movement of the scan platform or spacecraft maneuvers; to the FDS for changes in instrument configurations or telemetry rates and to numerous other subsystems within the spacecraft for specific actions. Fault-protection algorithms are also stored in the CCS, occupying roughly 10 percent of the CCS memory.
The main functions of the FDS are to collect data from, and controls the operations of, the scientific instruments; and to format engineering and science data for on-board storage and/or real-time transmission. The FDS also keeps the spacecraft "time" and provides frequency references to the instruments and other spacecraft subsystems.
The Voyager spacecraft computers are interrupt driven computer, similar to processors used in general purpose computers with a few special instructions for increased efficiency. The programming is a form of assembly language.
There is no clock chip, as such, in the spacecraft. The "clock" is really a counter, based on one of several electronically generated frequencies. These frequencies, based on a reference, generated by a very stable oscillator, are converted and fed to different locations in the spacecraft as synchronization signals, timers, counters, etc. The "clock" signal is part of the information telemetered to the ground and it is with ground software that we convert to day of year, time of day Greenwich Mean Time.
Voyager was built in-house at JPL; the computers were manufactured by General Electric to JPL specifications. -
Crowd Documentation | Nin Labs
Traditional documentation requires a process where a few people write for many potential users (especially in the case of API documentation). The resulting documentation, more often than not just doesn’t cut it — There isn’t enough examples, details, or explanations.
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'Modern Warfare' creators Jason West, Vince Zampella vs. Activision – USATODAY.com
LOS ANGELES – A star-studded trial of a different mode kicks off Friday here.
Kotick image by Patrick Fallon, Bloomberg; West and Zampella images by Frazer Harrison, Getty Images; body images by Jupiter Images; illustration by Kris Kinkade, USA TODAY
Vince Zampella, middle, and Jason West, right, are going to court over allegations that CEO of Activision Bobby Kotick, left, unfairly fired them before getting paid millions in bonuses for their role in creating 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.'
Enlarge
Kotick image by Patrick Fallon, Bloomberg; West and Zampella images by Frazer Harrison, Getty Images; body images by Jupiter Images; illustration by Kris Kinkade, USA TODAY
Vince Zampella, middle, and Jason West, right, are going to court over allegations that CEO of Activision Bobby Kotick, left, unfairly fired them before getting paid millions in bonuses for their role in creating 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.'
Sponsored Links
Jason West and Vince Zampella may not be household names, but as the creators of first-person shooter video games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, they are true celebrities in the $25 billion game industry. -
Greek-Style Corn On The Cob A La Evelyn Recipe - Food.com - 133092
Sunday, May 27, 2012
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Louisiana Incarcerated - NOLA.com
"Louisiana is the world's prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana's incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran's, seven times China's and 10 times Germany's. The hidden engine behind the state's well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash." Louisiana Incarcerated is a tour de force eight-part series on the Louisiana prison system. [more inside]
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Scientist: Evolution debate will soon be history - Times Union
NEW YORK — Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history.
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RPT-INSIGHT-Minute by minute, Nasdaq chaos engulfed Facebook IPO | Reuters
For nearly 20 minutes on the morning of Facebook Inc's trading debut last Friday, the line Nasdaq had opened up to keep traders informed about the social media company's $16 billion IPO had been mute. Well after the stock was supposed to have opened at 11 a.m. New York time, no one from Nasdaq was talking - and there was still no sign of trading.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
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What's an American Indian? Warren case stirs query | HeraldNet.com - Nation/World
What, exactly, makes someone American Indian? Even Indians themselves don't agree as they debate the case of Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, whose disputed claim of Native American identity is shining a rare spotlight on the malleable nature of Indian heritage and the long history of murky claims to such ancestry.
Friday, May 25, 2012
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Marcus Persson (Notch) answers an offer to track people across the internet (i.imgur.com)
submitted 5 hours ago by soundhaudegen to gaming
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Erik McClure: Multithreading Problems In Game Design
Consequently, don't try to multithread your games. It isn't worth it. Separately parallelize each individual component instead and write your game engine single-threaded; only use additional threads for asynchronous activities like resource loading.
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What the final decision on Oracle v. Google really means | Open source software - InfoWorld
The jury finally decided yesterday that Google did not infringe on any of Oracle's patents related to Android. Fantastic news -- but the wider view offers little comfort
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Transfer Photos From Phone to Computer With a 'Bump' | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
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5 Weeks of Go | Internet Alchemy
I promised a few people that I’d write up my impressions of Go after spending 5 or so weeks learning it while developing Amberfell. I’m not an expert in computer language design nor do I have extensive experience in obscure languages. I pick my language based on how productive I and others can be with it not on how pure it is.
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The guide to implementing 2D platformers | Higher-Order Fun
Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details.
The long-term goal is to make this an exhaustive and comprehensible guide to the implementation of 2D platform games. If you have any sort of feedback, correction, request, or addition – please leave it in the comments!
Thursday, May 24, 2012
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Browser choice: A thing of the past? | Internet & Media - CNET News
Devices using iOS and the future Windows RT hobble third-party browsers. Despite some good reasons for doing so, the change could undermine browser competition.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
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Ever wish there was an easy way to get up and running with Git and GitHub on your Windows computer? Turned off by command line utilities and setting up SSH keys? Want to join the incredible world of open and closed source collaboration that happens on GitHub.com every day?
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The Ego and the System Administrator
Because the Sys Admins and DBAs who are efficient end up wielding a great deal of power, there is always a danger that it can 'go to their head'. If ever you start imposing your decisions on the organisation for no better reason than the fact that they're yours, then it is time to read Matt's simple guide on how to prevent your actions being controlled by your ego.
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Engineering Infrastructures For Humans | Standalone Sysadmin
The idea behind Nudge is that every design decision that you make, as an engineer, affects the way that people behave toward your creation, so you should tend toward design decisions that encourage positive behavior in users.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
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LA Deputies On Beating Johnnie Franklin Jones - Page 1 - News - Orange County - OC Weekly
[Moxley Confidential] It isn't just the Kelly Thomas killing in which cops believe they have the right to execute a citizen during a scuffle
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Is College’s Stone Age About to End? - Bloomberg
Excessive specialization has created a culture of expertise that has distorted higher education and had a negative impact on faculty members, students and the broader society.
While global transportation, communications and information technologies have created interconnection, academic disciplines and fields have, paradoxically, become more fragmented and isolated. Universities boast of their global expansion and vision, but they are mostly siloed institutions ill-adapted to a networked world.
Monday, May 21, 2012
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Japanese culture is extraordinary for the way it seems able to accommodate every niche, every fetish, every tribe. Whatever you're into, you're not alone, and when you find your fellow travelers you can construct your own community, language, art and culture together. The Internet will get us all there eventually, but Japan usually gets there first.
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sipml5 - The world's first HTML5 SIP client - Google Project Hosting
This is the world's first open source HTML5 SIP client (May 12, 2012) entirely written in javascript for integration in social networks (FaceBook, Twitter, Google+), online games, e-commerce sites... No extension, plugin or gateway is needed. The media stack rely on WebRTC.
The client can be used to connect to any SIP or IMS network from your preferred browser to make and receive audio/video calls and instant messages. -
I've recently been working on an optimisation problem, and I've come to realise that I can consider it as wandering around on a smooth landscape in 1800 dimensions. Strange number, I know, but that's the way it's worked out.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
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Why Teaching Equality Hurts Men « shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows
Don’t let the title put you off. This isn’t what you think.
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We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines
The 8086 "AAA" instruction seemed like a good idea at the time. In the 1970s there was still a case to be made for operating on binary-coded decimal values, with two digits per byte. What's the advantage of BCD? Large values can be easily displayed without multi-byte division or multiplication. "ASCII Adjust After Addition," or AAA, was committed to the x86 hardware and 30+ years later it's still there, emulated in microcode, in every i7 processor.
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JPMorgan’s soap opera makes clear that Wall Street is detached from reality - The Washington Post
Jamie Dimon was right about one thing: The embarrassing $3-billion-and-counting trading loss at JPMorgan Chase has played right into the hands of pundits who think Wall Street needs to be put on a shorter leash.
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Developers Need to Index | SQL Performance Explained
SQL Performance problems are as old as SQL itself. Some might even say that SQL is inherently slow. Although it might have been true in the early days of SQL, it is definitely not true anymore. Nevertheless SQL performance problems are everywhere, everyday. How does this happen?
Friday, May 18, 2012
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Rapid-fire debugging thoughts - GameDev.net
Just a collection of assorted things that have been running through my mind during the past week and a half of marathon debugging...
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Writing Scripts - Google Apps Script — Google Developers
Writing Scripts
This section contains basic information about writing Google Apps Script scripts. For a full description of JavaScript syntax, see an online tutorial or book about JavaScript.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
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The Wizard of Oz (1939 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
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How John Roberts Orchestrated Citizens United : The New Yorker
When Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was first argued before the Supreme Court, on March 24, 2009, it seemed like a case of modest importance. The issue before the Justices was a narrow one.
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Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X, sits atop a hillside in an undisclosed location in Canada, watching a reporter and photographer make their way along a narrow path to join him, away from the prying eyes of law enforcement.
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Unsecured connections: Checking the basics | TechRepublic
Takeaway: The sheer number of connections we make every day using common programs and protocols multiplies the risk that basic security is overlooked.