Thomas Brox Røst

"So you're a metal detectorist and you find a silver figurine at storied Lejre in Denmark. It depicts a person sitting in a high seat whose posts end in two wolves' heads. And on either arm rest sits a raven. The style is typical for about AD 900. So when you hand the thing over to the site manager, he of course exclaims, "Holy shit! It's Odin!". And that's what he tells the press. Until somebody like me comes along and points out that it's a woman." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

Stack Overflow for scientists. - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"ATLANTA—A Zogby poll of 1,542 American grandparents published Monday found that grandsons were described as "very" to "extremely" talented by 1,542 of the respondents. "Participants in the poll were emphatic in their descriptions of the talents of grandsons in fields as diverse as advertising and sales, choral performance, baseball, talking, crawling, making their beds, video games, and instructing their elders on proper cell-phone use," pollster Tom Waterton said. "In addition, an overwhelming percentage of grandchildren were described as outgoing, sharp, and looking just like Uncle Andy, you remember Uncle Andy, he was always up to something, too bad he passed so young, he would have loved the grandchild in question." Sources at Zogby admitted that the survey was incomplete, as several hundred pollsters are still unable to get their assigned grandparents off the phone." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"[I]f ever a board of directors needed shuffling, it was GM's, which had been utterly docile in the face of mounting evidence of looming disaster. We decided to recommend to Tim, Larry, and ultimately the President a package that would include replacing Rick with Fritz as interim CEO, changing at least half of the board, and making an outside director chairman (which should be universal)." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Only 37 percent of US companies have a separate board chair from the CEO, and over half of these chairs are not independent — they are the former CEO of that same company. So who's right — the British, Canadians, and Kenneth Feinberg, or the overwhelming majority of US firms that still combine the chairman and CEO roles? Let's look at the data. What it tells us quite clearly is that the appointment of an independent board chair, separate from the CEO, is not associated with any statistically significant improvement in either the company's net income or its stock price." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"From a game-theory perspective, price wars are usually negative-sum games: everyone loses. A recent study found that, if competitors do match price cuts, industry profits can get cut almost in half. The best way to win a price war, then, is not to play in the first place. Instead, you can compete in other areas: customer service or quality. Or you can collude with your putative competitors: that’s why cartels like OPEC exist. Or—since overt collusion is usually illegal—you can employ subtler tactics (which economists call “signalling”), like making public statements about the importance of “stable pricing.” The idea is to let your competitors know that you’re not eager to slash prices—but that, if a price war does start, you’ll fight to the bitter end." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

Overview of font web sites. - Thomas Brox Røst

"Surviving is succeeding, no doubt about it. Doing the work is better than not doing the work. Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress. But, and it's a huge but, you define yourself by the work you do, and perhaps you need to redefine what you're willing to take and where you're looking for it." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist whose revolutionary studies of what was once called “primitive man” transformed Western understanding of the nature of culture, custom and civilization, has died at 100." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"In economics, the crucial Keynesian concept is uncertainty. Where it prevails, the simple rules of classical economics don’t apply. That’s because the classical economics that both predated Keynes and superseded him relies on rational actors making rational assessments. In order to make such assessments you have to have reliable knowledge, usually derived from past experience. Buyers of oranges or newspapers or legal services can be said to possess such knowledge. Buyers of speculative securities cannot. They’re always looking into an uncertain future, “anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be,” as Keynes put it. This, in Skidelsky’s convincing telling, is why financial markets are so prone to disorder and disaster. It’s not that investors are terribly irra­tional. It’s that no one can really know what rational means when it comes to pricing investment securities" - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"WASHINGTON—At a press conference Monday, President Obama announced that he had appointed legendary comic book writer Alan Moore as the official biographer of his time in the White House. "As evidenced by his epic run on Swamp Thing #21–64, Moore's deft hand with both sociopolitical commentary and metaphysical violence makes him an ideal choice to chronicle my time in office," Obama said of the author of Watchmen and From Hell, whom he reportedly chose over others on a short list of potential biographers that included Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, and Bob Woodward." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"This isn't so much a post in the "GSI" series, but just two links that recently came out. Kevin Knight and Philip Resnik both just came out with tutorials for Bayesian NLP. They're both excellent, and almost entirely non-redundant. I highly recommend reading both." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Kiwi is a lightweight javascript framework designed to help you organize your javascript code. It uses the tried and tested MVC architectural pattern to separate code that is doing different things." - Thomas Brox Røst

"As far as style goes, most of the people I’ve met using iPhones were overweight middle-aged men. Most of the G1 users that I’ve met were attractive slender women between the ages of 20 and 40." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"A filter to integrate Google Closure compiler in django-compress plugin." - Thomas Brox Røst

"Wikipedians are 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, and around 70 percent of them are under the age of 30." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"When you play note on the AvantGrand, you're basically triggering an extremely high-quality recording of a concert piano, adjusted in volume depending on how hard you hit the keys. The lengths to which the designers have gone to replicate the experience of a top-notch grand piano are almost absurd. Each key is attached to a hammer that, while it has no string to strike, imitates the kick you get when you hit a traditional piano key. Two resonators under the hood cause the entire instrument to vibrate subtly the way a real piano does when the sound is resonating inside—an effect that is solely meant to imitate for the player the physicality of a real piano." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. So yes, you need to keep up. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. So I'll give you two answers. You read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Sincerial is a recommendation company helping you find what you are looking for in online shops. We use information about your shopping history to determine what is of interest for you. If we don't know anything about you, we will give you general recommendations based on other users' behavior. See us in action at fundies.no (Norwegian site). Sincerial was founded by Per Gunnar Auran, PhD and Knut O. Hellan, MSc. They have a combined experience of 18 years in the web search industry covering Fast Search & Transfer, Overture, Yahoo! and Google." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"No cloud platform vendor is more communicative and more of a “listener” than Amazon. In my mind, this is where Amazon has a huge advantage specifically over Google. While Google is slowly opening up their App Engine these days, it feels like they are being pulled into this mind set, especially when compared to Amazon’s approach. I think back to the glory days of Microsoft, and the immense effort that Tod Nielsen put into wooing the developer community. To me Amazon is executing right out of that playbook." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Initial support for RDS has just been added to boto. The code currently lives in the subversion trunk but a new boto release will be out very soon that will also include the new RDS module." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"There’s a classroom exercise that’s a part of the Stanford technology venture program hits its students with each year: If you had five dollars and two hours, what would you do to make as much money as possible? STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig discusses the query and how budding entrepreneurs responded." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"Lyst, the operator of US fast food chain McDonald's in Iceland, announced yesterday that the restaurant’s doors will close at the end of this month. The reason is the rising cost of imported supplies following the collapse of the Icelandic króna. The low exchange rate in addition to high tariffs have doubled the company’s expenses for meat, cheese, vegetables and other products and challenged its profitability. The ingredients for hamburgers must be imported according to McDonald's' regulations, visir.is reports." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

"The essay on Emergency Department electronic health record (EHR) problems in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) by medical informatics professor Dr. Jon Patrick, Health Information Technologies Research Laboratory (HITRL), University of Sydney, that I referenced in my posts "The Story of the Deployment of an ED Clinical Information System ‐ Systemic Failure or Bad Luck" and "NSW Nightmare and Overuse of Computers" appears to have been censored. This apparently occurred at the level of the the government." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet