How will better matchmaking and collaborative filtering bring you better choices?

Can liars and cheats be made more accountable?

How can the barrage of advertising, spam, events, and interesting ideas be filtered more effectively?

What are effective ways to evaluate products and business partners?

How can higher-quality news media and public discourse be achieved?

Who do you trust? What do you believe?

The Reputation Society

In the past month, however, two new court rulings suggest that judges are developing a more sophisticated sense of how corporations conduct online and technology transactions with their customers.

Courts Turn Against Abusive Clickwrap Contracts

Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, said yesterday that more borrowers with good credit were falling behind on their loans and that the housing market might not begin recovering until 2009 because of a decline in house prices that goes beyond anything experienced in decades.

Top Lender Sees Mortgage Woes for ‘Good’ Risks - New York Times

Packet switching works well for moving data -- why not use it for moving humans? In a nutshell, the French Aramis transit project proposed packet switching as a solution to human transport problems (though, so far as I can tell, neither the author nor any reviews I have yet read have made this connection).

Apropos to PRT.

Aramis, or the Love of Technology

In 2003, Ford Research proposed a dual-mode system called PRISM. It would use public guideways with privately-purchased but certified dual-mode vehicles. The vehicles would weigh less than 600 kg (1200 lb), allowing small elevated guideways that could use centralized computer controls and power.

(from Wikipedia PRT article)

Too bad noone has the vision to build something like this out.

PRISMGPCPaper.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Northrop Grumman Corp. agreed July 5 to increase its stake in Scaled Composites - the builder of the Ansari X-Prize Cup-winning SpaceShipOne and a host of record-breaking aircraft - from 40 percent to 100 percent, Northrop Grumman spokesman Dan McClain confirmed July 20.

SPACE.com -- Northrop Grumman Buys Builder of SpaceShipOne

There were a few things swimmers needed to know before slipping into the Charles River for the big race on Saturday.

A Boston River Now (Mostly) Fit for Swimming - New York Times

David C. Monson seems an improbable soul to find at the leading edge of a national movement to legalize growing hemp, a plant that shares a species name, a genus type and, in many circles, a reputation, with marijuana.

Sober North Dakotans Hope to Legalize Hemp - New York Times

With the 50th anniversary of spaceflight coming on Oct. 4 – the day the former Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into orbit – Space News has been taking a look back at major milestones over the past five decades. Here, Clinton Parks highlights NASA's historic Apollo 11 lunar mission, which landed the first humans on the moon on 38 years ago today:

SPACE.com -- July 20, 1969: 'One Small Step for Man...'

[WWW] Hadoop is a framework for running applications on large clusters built of commodity hardware. The Hadoop framework transparently provides applications both reliability and data motion. Hadoop implements a computational paradigm named Map/Reduce, where the application is divided into many small fragments of work, each of which may be executed or reexecuted on any node in the cluster. In addition, it provides a distributed file system (HDFS) that stores data on the compute nodes, providing very high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster. Both Map/Reduce and the distributed file system are designed so that node failures are automatically handled by the framework.

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