Thomas Brox Røst

"“In much wisdom is much grief,” counsels the book of Ecclesiastes, and in Christopher R. Beha’s tender intellectual memoir, we find plenty of both. By the time he set out to read all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics — known as the Five-Foot Shelf — Beha had already survived blood cancer and seen his identical twin brother nearly die after a car accident. And in a year that would take Beha from ancient Greece to the 20th century, illness and death returned once more, reminding him that no amount of learning can efface what Pascal called the “eternal silence of these infinite spaces.”" - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"Much of our lives are spent in groups with other people: we form groups to socialise, earn money, play sport, make music, even to change the world. But although groups are diverse, many of the psychological processes involved are remarkably similar. Here are 10 insightful studies that give a flavour of what has been discovered about the dynamics of group psychology." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"Googler Jake Brutlag recently published a short study, "Speed Matters for Google Web Search" (PDF), which looked at how important it is to deliver and render search result pages quickly. Specifically, Jake added very small delays (100-400ms) to the time to serve and render Google search results. He observed that even these tiny delays, which are low enough to be difficult for users to perceive, resulted in measurable drops in searches per user (declines of -0.2% to -0.6%)." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"Here's an item that'll spark some jealousy in any entrepreneur who finds it tough raising venture capital in the current climate: CloudSwitch has raised a second round of $8 million in venture capital funding, led by new investor Commonwealth Capital Ventures. This follows a first round of $7.4 million that was first reported here on Innovation Economy in January." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"Maira Kalman - Time Wastes Too Fast" - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"Cycling, Incremental, Compressed, Encrypted Backups to Amazon S3" - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"An IBM researcher has solved a thorny mathematical problem that has confounded scientists since the invention of public-key encryption several decades ago. The breakthrough, called "privacy homomorphism," or "fully homomorphic encryption," makes possible the deep and unlimited analysis of encrypted information - data that has been intentionally scrambled - without sacrificing confidentiality." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"Using the solution could help strengthen the business model of "cloud computing," where a computer vendor is entrusted to host the confidential data of others in a ubiquitous Internet presence. It might better enable a cloud computing vendor to perform computations on clients' data at their request, such as analyzing sales patterns, without exposing the original data." - Thomas Brox Røst

"When I met the New Zealand born artist Seymour two weeks ago at an opening at Strychnin Gallery he wasn’t exactly over the moon about my comparison with the American cult director and multi-talent Tim Burton. Of course as an artist you don’t really want to hear that your work looks like that of someone else, do you?" - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"Inc.com just released their annual valuation guide for 2009, which allows business owners to gauge the value of their, uh, business. At the center of this guide is an interactive "business valuation calculator" by Tommy McCall. I guess the best way to describe the graphic is Trendalyzer with some style and added functionality. Each dot represents an industry and the position on the chart indicates whether the companies in that industry are priced high or low. Press the play button and watch how prices change between 2002 and now. Finally, if you've got a business of your own, enter your own values to for a custom value estimate." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"Mike Wiacek wrote a little program that extracts a Lightroom preset from a Flickr photo. Basically, if you see a Flickr photo you like, you can try out the Preset Extractor to create a Lightroom preset of the effect. The extractor looks at the metadata and tries to reverse engineer it into a preset." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"There are many different kinds of academic output. Papers, citations, funding received, teaching feedback, and promotions are just some of the ways in which we can measure our success, either directly or indirectly. But as Jose pointed out previously, these outputs are all trying to attract a scarce resource, namely attention, and success in attracting attention results in prestige." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"12. Shake not the head, Feet, or Legs roll not the Eyes lift not one eyebrow higher than the other wry not the mouth, and bedew no mans face with your Spittle, by approaching too near him when you Speak. 13. Kill no Vermin as Fleas, lice ticks &c in the Sight of Others, if you See any filth or thick Spittle put your foot Dexterously upon it if it be upon the Cloths of your Companions, Put it off privately, and if it be upon your own Cloths return Thanks to him who puts it off." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"BREADBOX64 is a twitter client for the C64/128 which allows you to tweet from a real C64 and show your friends timeline. It uses Contiki, a very nice embedded OS, and the MMC Replay cartridge with the RR-Net add on for the physical connection to the net." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"I have lived with eight dogs, watched six of them grow old and infirm with grace and dignity, and die with what seemed to be acceptance. I have seen old dogs grieve at the loss of their friends. I have come to believe that as they age, dogs comprehend the passage of time, and, if not the inevitability of death, certainly the relentlessness of the onset of their frailties. They understand that what’s gone is gone. What dogs do not have is an abstract sense of fear, or a feeling of injustice or entitlement. They do not see themselves, as we do, as tragic heroes, battling ceaselessly against the merciless onslaught of time. Unlike us, old dogs lack the audacity to mythologize their lives. You’ve got to love them for that." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"Exploring Content Models for Multi-Document Summarization (Haghighi and Vanderwende). This combines my two favorite things: summarization and topic models. My admittedly biased view was they started with something similar to BayeSum and then ran a marathon. There are a bunch of really cool ideas in here for content-based summarization." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet

"If there were only 100 people in Ireland, 55 of them would be speaking only English, 39 of them would be speaking mainly English, and occasionally Irish, 2 of them would be speaking mainly Irish and one would be speaking Polish. Three would be speaking other languages." - Thomas Brox Røst via Bookmarklet