Kartik Agaram › Likes

Shiny. - DGentry

I've seen a lot of people w/issues using Time Capsule on the Apple forums (dropped connection -> corrupted disk). The USB Time Machine connections work reasonably well for me, as long as I remember to plug it in when I dock it at my desk at night. - Matt M (inactive)

There's a lot of things governed by 3/4 power laws. Still, this is interesting: "Chen Hou from Arizona State University has found that the same mathematical principles govern the lives of insect colonies and individual animals. You could predict how quickly an individual insect grows or burn food, how much effort it puts into reproduction and how long it lives by plugging its body weight into a simple formula. That same formula works for insect colonies too, if you treat their members as a collective whole. " - Michael Nielsen

Let me guess .. because they don't expect that their audience will catch them out when they misreport something, and the consequences for being exposed are typically not severe ? Scientists that publish falsified results have the offending papers retracted and are forced to change careers. Journalists that misreport or falsify science and get caught out ... continue to be journalists,... more... - Andrew Perry

Matt Leifer: Very good point. The blame cannot rest entirely on journalists or editors, since the push from Universities to produce catchy press releases, at the expense of accuracy, has also left journalists with poor material to work with. The strategy seems to be that it's better to have *something* (*anything*!) published in the mainstream press for PR purposes, even if that something bears little accurate information of the scientific discovery being reported. - Andrew Perry

"CommonCrawl's mission is to build, maintain and make widely available a comprehensive crawl of the Internet for the purpose of enabling a new wave of innovation, education and research." - Michael Nielsen

And now for the API's to access the index. But isn't this duplication of Yahoo BOSS effort? - Satish Bhat

"1. You don't know what a person really thinks until you hear his or her advice. Along these lines, if you really want to know what a person thinks, ask for advice and he or she will open up. 2. In philanthropy there is a saying: "Ask for money and you will get advice. Ask for advice and you will get money." 3. There are many exacting scholars who should be locked in a room, asked for advice of various kinds, and forced to speak into a tape recorder with no edits allowed. The advice-giving mode mobilizes insights which otherwise remain dormant, perhaps for fear of falsification or ridicule or of actually influencing people. All of the transcripts should be put on The Advice Website, with an open comments section, to limit the actual influence of the advice. Some famous people would be revealed as foolish in critical regards. The contents would be most interesting as non-advice and the site would carry a government warning that the advice is not to be taken seriously." - Michael Nielsen

There are two ways that companies can extend what they're doing. One is they can take an inventory of their skills and competencies, and then they can say, "OK, with this set of skills and competencies, what else can we do?" And that's a very useful technique that all companies should use. But there's a second method, which takes a longer-term orientation. It is to say, rather than ask what are we good at and what else can we do with that skill, you ask, who are our customers? What do they need? And then you say we're going to give that to them regardless of whether we currently have the skills to do so, and we will learn those skills no matter how long it takes. Kindle is a great example of that. It's been on the market for two years, but we worked on it for three years in earnest before that. We talked about it for a year before that. We had to go hire people to build a hardware--engineering team to build the device. We had to acquire new skills. There's a tendency, I think, for... more... - Lu Liu from Bookmarklet

"With the recession, shoplifting is on the rise, according to booksellers. At BookPeople in Austin, Tex., the rate of theft has increased to approximately one book per hour. I asked Steve Bercu, BookPeople’s owner, what the most frequently stolen title was. “The Bible,” he said, without pausing." - Michael Nielsen

Interesting discussion. - Paul Buchheit

It's utterly unsurprising to me that the details of a bunch of personal and professional emails are a little ugly. That's probably true for almost any of us. Who wouldn't, in their reasonably private communications, hurl a few barbs at people who've been relentlessly attacking your work and your person for years, tying you up with constant frivolous data requests, and in some cases (as with Wei-Chyung Wang) having people threaten to have you arrested for fraud? I'm glad I don't work in that field. - Joel Webber

The Nature review raises a good point: What kind of support will scientists need to cope with frivolous FOIAs and other attempts to legislatively hinder their work? - Mr. Gunn

Thanks for the Nature link, Hisham. The ending paragraph sums it up well, I think: "In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings — and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values. Yet it is precisely in such circumstances that researchers should... more... - Joel Webber

Interesting article by Diamond. Not quantitatively convincing, of course - it's an NYT op-ed - but does challenge much conventional wisdom in the green movement. - Michael Nielsen

Interesting article by Diamond. Not quantitatively convincing, of course - it's an NYT op-ed - but does challenge much conventional wisdom in the green movement. - Michael Nielsen

"I have wondered for years, as magazines, newspapers, and other news organizations have been hemorrhaging money and employees, why someone hasn't gone into the contract fact-checking business. Like, it could be an extension of Snopes.com. There's a huge redundancy in every publication having their own research desks, so they could lay off all of their fact-checkers and then outsource the job to the new, independent company that the best of them then all go to work for. Meanwhile, the company could also be hired by anyone else. Then, when the public sees the "Fact-Checked by MiniTrue (SM)" seal on someone's independent blog, they know the information there has the same credibility as the big boys." - Michael Nielsen