fshamsi › Comments

Seems like Oct is traditionally a volatile month: 'Known as the jinx month because of crashes in 1929, 1987, the 554-point drop on October 27, 1997, back-to-back massacres in 1978 and 1979 and Friday the 13th in 1989. ... Yet October is a "bear killer" and turned the tide in 11 post-WWII bear markets: 1946, 1957, 1960, 1962, 1966, 1974, 1987, 1990, 1998, 2001, and 2002.' - fshamsi

"...almost everything on your profile, even if you use privacy settings to limit access, is available to the quiz...." - fshamsi

"Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time." - fshamsi

"Assumption number one was that if a trial were managed correctly, a medication would perform as well or badly in a Phoenix hospital as in a Bangalore clinic. Potter discovered, however, that geographic location alone could determine whether a drug bested placebo or crossed the futility boundary." - fshamsi

"Scientists have photographed "upwards lightning", a rarely-seen phenomenon where electricity from storms flows into the upper atmosphere." - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

Full text: http://www.nytimes.com/2009... - fshamsi

Guardian coverage: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news... - fshamsi

Google Squared is now live - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

TechCrunch coverage from the preview: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - fshamsi

interesting - Christopher Chung

"Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s Transportation commissioner, manages to be equal parts Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. As she prepares to close swaths of Broadway to cars next week, she is igniting a peculiar new culture war—over the role of the automobile in New York." - fshamsi

"This fake advisory was spotted at the Metropolitan G stop recently" - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

"Purwajiono rows his wooden boat through polluted waters at Pluit dam in Jakarta, Indonesia, on April 20." - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

A spoof of a failed mayoral campaign: "Bloomberg: I will be your mayor whether you like it or not" - fshamsi

"The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work ,and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income" Original WSJ article: http://online.wsj.com/article... - fshamsi

"Eye On Springfield is a retrospective of Simpsons hilarity spanning from seasons 1 to 9, when it was still funny." - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

"To find out why some professions are prevalent among politicians The Economist trawled through a sample of almost 5,000 politicians in “International Who’s Who”, a reference book, to examine their backgrounds. Some findings are predictable. Africa is full of military men, while lawyers dominate in democracies such as Germany, France and, of course, America. China has a fondness for engineers. But other countries have their own peculiarities. Egypt likes academics; South Korea, civil servants; Brazil, doctors." - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

Full article: http://www.economist.com/world... - fshamsi

"About 390,000 people listed their religion as Jedi in the 2001 Census for England and Wales. In Scotland the figure was a reported 14,000." - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

"Today the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics is putting 200 million data records from the watchdog group's archive directly into the hands of citizens, activists, journalists and anyone else interested in following the money in U.S. politics." - fshamsi

"In early April, the New York Times briefly reported the results of an eating behavior experiment. Investigators asked college students to choose foods from menus that differed in only one feature; one menu offered a salad and the other did not. The point? To find out whether the presence of a salad on the menu influenced what else the students ate. It did. The students choose French fries more often from the menu with the salad. " - fshamsi

Design your own muppet. Apparently they have been selling these since at least December 2008 and allowed designs online - they're sold out now. - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

"A violent Easter ritual has Times Square businesses beefing up security as they brace for a surge in post-Auto Show gang activity this weekend. Easter Sunday -- which has become known as "Gang Initiation Day" because of the parade of hoods wearing Bloods colors who swarm the area -- has scared tourists and store owners alike. "They come in, they throw chairs, they throw cups of ice at each other. It's a disaster," said John Andersen, 32, a manager at the 24-hour McDonald's on West 42nd Street. "This year, we've got eight security guards working. That's twice what we normally have."" - fshamsi

"This map from Dan Meth displays popular sitcoms by where they took place." - fshamsi

'“This is the biggest and most adhesive honor The Simpsons has ever received,” said Matt Groening, creator and executive producer of The Simpsons.' - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

"In case you’re wondering where a few billion dollars of your tax money went, the geniuses at GM announced that they took it and partnered with Segway to come up with this little contraption - the PUMA (for Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility – how a car fails to fit this definition was not explained)." - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

"For the first time, MIT researchers have shown they can genetically engineer viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery." - fshamsi

"Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. Amazon Elastic MapReduce lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity upon which they sit." - Bret Taylor from Bookmarklet

@Ray - a little off topic, but I've often thought that the vector processing capabilities in GPUs would make them a good match for doing recommenders on the client - Nick Lothian

The stamps, a sneak peek of which will be unveiled April 9, also will help celebrate the longest-running primetime comedy's 20th anniversary this year. - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

(10) Not Budgeting for Your First Home Loan (9) Not Performing a Credit Check Before Homebuying (8) Not Understanding Housing Market Trends (7) Not Getting a Preapproved Home Loan (6) Not Considering Home Resale Value (5) Blindly Following Your Realtor's Advice (4) Trusting a Verbal Agreement When Homebuying (3) Forgetting About the Hidden Costs of Homebuying. (2) Skipping the Home Inspection (1) Falling In Love with a House - fshamsi

"For nearly 20 years, Dunkin' Donuts accommodated his religious beliefs, even providing him signs for his store that said, "No meat products available," Elkhatib asserted in court documents. But in 2002, the company reversed course and told him it would not renew his franchise agreement if he did not sell its full line of products. Elkhatib sued the company but because he is not an employee of Dunkin' Donuts, he could not sue under federal laws banning religious discrimination in the workplace. Instead, he invoked a law that bars racial and certain forms of ancestry discrimination in the making of contracts." - fshamsi

"Obama presented Elizabeth II with an iPod containing video from her 2007 visit to the States. In return, the first family received what is apparently a standard present for visiting dignitaries to the Palace -- a silver-framed photo of the Queen and her husband." - fshamsi

"Google is tight-lipped about its computing operations, but the company for the first time on Wednesday revealed the hardware at the core of its Internet might at a conference here about the increasingly prominent issue of data center efficiency. " - fshamsi from Bookmarklet

"Why isn't there a service to aggregate and pool funds to sponsor programming particular features or bugfixes in open source software?" - fshamsi