A presentation from An Event Apart, held in New Orleans in April 2008.

Findability Bliss Through Web Standards

l33t-eyechart

“He determined that if they cross-pollinate, they produce more seed and more vigorous seedlings,” said Margaret Falk, a horticulturalist and associate vice president at the New York Botanical Garden. The variation is evolution’s way of increasing cross-pollination, she said.

Now the Botanical Garden is replicating this work, and more of Darwin’s Down House experiments, in a stunning, multipart exhibition called “Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure.”

What Darwin Saw Out Back

Click through for Must-See visuals.

Seattle-based concept artist Daniel Dociu is Chief Art Director for ArenaNet, the North American wing of NCSoft, an online game developer with headquarters in Seoul. Most notably, Dociu heads up the production of game environments for Guild Wars – to which GameSpot gave 9.2 out of 10, specifically citing the game's "gorgeous graphics" and its "richly detailed and shockingly gigantic" world.

Game/Space: An Interview with Daniel Dociu

At the Harvard Crimson, they say BSG is the best thing on TV.

No one stops going to see movies just because some films aren’t as good as “The Godfather,” yet plenty of the smartest, most art-loving people I know never watch a minute of television. And that’s a real shame.

TV Is Art--Why Don't You Watch?

Until recently, performance improvement was not difficult. Processors just kept getting faster. Waiting a year for the customer's hardware to be upgraded was a valid optimization strategy. Nowadays, however, individual processors don't get much faster; systems just get more of them.

Much comment has been made on coding paradigms to target multiple-processor cores, but the data-parallel paradigm is a newer approach that may just turn out to be easier to code to, and easier for processor manufacturers to implement.

Data-Parallel Computing

A project heralded as the dawning of an innovative, low-cost era in Navy shipbuilding has turned into a case study of how not to build a combat ship. The bill for the ship, being built by Lockheed Martin, has soared to $531 million, more than double the original, and by some calculations could be $100 million more. With an alternate General Dynamics prototype similarly struggling at an Alabama shipyard, the Navy last year temporarily suspended the entire program.

The program’s tribulations speak to what military experts say are profound shortcomings in the Pentagon’s acquisitions system. Even as spending on new projects has risen to its highest point since the Reagan years, being over budget and behind schedule have become the norm: a recent Government Accountability Office audit found that 95 projects — warships, helicopters and satellites — were delayed 21 months on average and cost 26 percent more than initially projected, a bill of $295 billion.

Lesson on How Not to Build a Navy Ship

In the interest of promoting better housing policy in the future it is important to have a public acknowledgement of the follies of homeownership ideology. We don't have a bottomless pit of money to satisfy their perverse ideology. If homeownership does not make economic sense, then we should not tell people to sacrifice healthcare and other essential needs to make the ideologues happy. It's time to force some honesty into the discussion of housing policy - renting sometimes make sense.

The homeownership ideology

As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data—keyword search—will one day break down in its ability to deliver the exact information we want at our fingertips. In fact, some argue that keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns.

Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point?

The Hadoop Summit brought together leaders from the Hadoop developer and user communities for the first time. Apache Hadoop, an open-source distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation, is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data. Slides and video from the presentations are available below.

Hadoop Summit and Data-Intensive Computing Symposium