A scene from the 1980 film Teen Witch, which appears to be in development for a remake with Ashley Tisdale, to be released in 2010.

'Teen Witch' (1980)

If you want reliable global Internet connections, have a limitless appetite for video, or happen to live in Greenland or East Africa, here's some good news: a construction surge in transoceanic cable is under way.

Technology Review: New Oceans of Data

In computer science, conferences are often the primary medium of scientific communication, and conference submissions are reviewed at least as stringently as journal papers. Despite the importance of the process, not much has been written on the subject.

Reviewing Conference Papers

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.

Benjamin Zander on music and passion | Video on TED.com

Never mind Web 3.0: The next stage in technological evolution is a single worldwide computer.

Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer

This presentation feels akin to a new Disney ride: During your tour inside David Macaulay’s imagination, prepare to soar over Rome’s great monuments, raft within the human body’s circulatory system, and dismantle and rebuild the Empire State Building.

I fondly remember Macaulay's early books.

Watch for the mention of why hotel toilet paper is folded that way. I was also reminded of this:

Ira Glass: "Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap."

Also:

Failure is an essential part of the process. "The way you say this is: 'Please fail very quickly -- so that you can try again'," says Eric Schmidt, CEO at Google.

The Way David Macaulay Works: Finding Ideas, Making Books and Visualizing Our World

Record foreclosures and limited access to credit will make it harder than usual to rebound from this U.S. housing market slump, the worst at least since World War Two, according to a Harvard University study on Monday.

A two-year home price drop is eating into housing wealth, curbing consumer spending and slicing away economic growth. This is unlikely to change until potential home buyers are convinced that prices have stopped tumbling, the study found.

The downturn has room to run.

U.S. Housing: Not Dead Yet, Concludes Harvard Study

This is a data-heavy presentation from two economists at CIBC World Markets. You'll have to make your own soundtrack. See how China dominates the growth in demand for natural resources. See how much is accomplished by Americans' purchase of hybrid vehicles, in the face of massive market growth in Russia and China. Watch how gasoline hits US$7/gallon by 2012. Watch ethanol peter out and energy capacity fall short. Watch the Case/Shiller HPI continue to plummet as delinquencies soar. And so much more!

The Age of Scarcity

Paul Krugman:

Here’s a question rarely asked, at least in Washington: Why should ever-increasing homeownership be a policy goal? How many people should own homes, anyway?

Although it’s rarely put this way, borrowing to buy a home is like buying stocks on margin: if the market value of the house falls, the buyer can easily lose his or her entire stake.

This isn’t a hypothetical worry.

And now, for your daily Simpsons reference, from "Trash of the Titans":

% Later, in Moe's bar, Homer moans about his problems.

Homer: [melancholy] My campaign is a disaster, Moe.
Homer: [angry] I hate the public so much!
Homer: [melancholy] If only they'd elect me.
Homer: [angry] I'd make 'em pay!
Homer: [melancholy] Aw, Moe, how do I make 'em like me?
Moe: Eh, gee, you're kind of all over the place, Homer, you need to focus here. You gotta...think hard, and come up with a slogan that appeals to all the lazy slobs out there.
Homer: [moans] Can't someone else do it?
Moe: "Can't someone else do it?", that's perfect!
Homer: It is?
Moe: Yeah! Now get out there and spread that message to the people!
Homer: Woo hoo! [walks off]
Moe: Woah, hey, you didn't pay for the beer.
Homer: "Can't someone else do it?"

[Moe and Homer laugh together. As Homer starts to leave the tavern, Moe cocks and points a shotgun at him and clears his throat.]

Moe: Seriously, give me the money.

It's doubly relevant:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”.

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

Home Not-So-Sweet Home, and the ownership obsession

Code is Law.

As Google's influence grows, a number of scholars and programmers have begun to argue that the company is acquiring too much power over our lives - invading our privacy, shaping our preferences, and controlling how we learn about and understand the world around us. To counter its pervasive effects, they are developing strategies to push back against Google, dilute its growing dominance of the information sphere, and make it more publicly accountable.

Some of the suggestions for fighting back are more practical than others, but taken together they represent an argument that "searching" is no longer a neutral tool, but has become a social force in itself - Google's hidden algorithms have the power to make or break reputations and fortunes, to shape public debates, and to change our view of the world.

The challenge is how to do this without undermining an online application that, even its critics concede, is one of the greatest learning and labor-saving devices of our time.

Two from last year:

Virgil Griffith, creator of Wikiscanner, announced LawScanner within two hours after Speaker Pelosi's declaration. The Register writes up the story: Code is Law, but Law is Sausage.

Mmmm, don't you just love the smell of PageRank in the morning?

War’s changing character is not only augmented by the emergence of the new media; the way the web and today’s communication devices are used to organize lives also instructs our understanding of how killing is organized. The argument put forward here is that the web’s emerging organizing principles — including a social as well as a technological dimension — increasingly govern the management of violence.

Also:

10: Indeed, drawing in part on the reasoning of Verdugo-Urquidez, as well as the Supreme Court's treatment of the destruction of property for the purposes of military necessity, our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.

Finally:

According to Sense Networks, all the location data that it gathers from mobile phones, GPS and Wi-Fi is completely anonymous so privacy should not be an issue.

Stopping Google