Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
My week: Steven Pinker | 7 Days | The Observer
Topic: Society
11:09 am EDT, Oct 14, 2007
In the course of my bookshop lecture, I mention many of the taboo words in English. (I don't swear, I tell people; I talk about swearing.) Several passages reliably bring the house down, including a 16th-century curse advising someone to engage in an undignified sexual act with a cow and a verbatim recitation of the Clean Airwaves Act, a piece of legislation stipulating what you can't say on the radio that is so filthy it effectively outlaws discussion of itself.
The exception to the expected merriment was a lecture hosted by a megachurch in Dallas and introduced by the minister; my usual laugh lines drew only nervous titters. I worried that I had offended the audience but then learnt at the signing that everyone enjoyed the lecture - they just didn't know whether they were allowed to laugh in front of the minister.
Mark Allman is giving a talk on personal namespaces at this conference on 14-15 November 2007.
The Sixth Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-VI), to be held in Atlanta, GA, will bring together researchers in the networking systems community to engage in lively discussion of future trends in networking research and technology. The workshop, which is sponsored by ACM SIGCOMM, provides a venue for researchers to present and discuss ideas that have the potential to significantly influence the community in the long term; the goal is to promote community-wide discussions of those ideas.
The workshop will be held at the Klaus Advanced Computing Building, which is the new home of the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech, in the Midtown area of Atlanta.
For their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change:
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.
People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments — moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.
In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.
Not Again: 24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice
Topic: Arts
9:24 pm EDT, Oct 10, 2007
The theme is a bit Diggy, but the list is worthy.
1. Requiem For A Dream (2000) (*) 2. Dancer In The Dark (2000) 3. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1928) (*) 4. The Seventh Continent (1989) 5. Winter Light (1962) (*) 6. Bad Lieutenant (1992) (*) 7. Straw Dogs (1971) (*) 8. Audition (1999) 9. Sick: The Life And Death Of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997) 10. Come And See (1985) 11. In A Year Of 13 Moons (1978) 12. Safe (1995) 13. Irreversible (2002) (*) 14. Boys Don't Cry (1999) 15. Grave Of The Fireflies (1988) 16. When The Wind Blows (1986) 17. Leaving Las Vegas (1996) (*) 18. Jonestown: The Life And Death Of Peoples Temple (2006) 19. S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) 20. The Last House On The Left (1972) (*) 21. Million Dollar Baby (2004) (*) 22. United 93 (2006) (*) 23. Lilya 4-Ever (2002) (*) 24. Nil By Mouth (1997) (*)
Click through for video clips.
This list is from AV Club, an Onion outlet. Incidentally, the stuff coming out of the Onion News Network lately is pretty incredible. (Most of it is also NSFW.) Consider this one, for example.
Three-dimensional mapping of starling flocks could shed light not only on the birds' collective behavior but also on a broad range of other aggregate systems.
The group's web site has more information, but the site design is awful. It seems to have been built for 640x480 monitors, or perhaps cell phones.
Usually, when an IT project fails, management is the last to know. But eventually, like a fish left too long in the refrigerator, the failure becomes all too obvious. When the situation reaches that point, your only option is the IT equivalent of pulling everything out of the refrigerator and scrubbing it out with baking soda.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Conventional wisdom to the contrary, project management is getting better. More projects are succeeding, fewer projects are failing outright, and projects are returning more of the IT dollar invested.
Still, only about one-third of all projects are complete successes. Often, the difference between success and failure is spotting the critical early warning signs that a project is in trouble. Here's a quick look at some of the earliest symptoms that all is not right with your "fish"—and what you can do about it before you have to break out the baking soda.
The marketing plan, business model and sometimes the company itself die, but good technology tends to live on. Think of it as the biz/tech equivalent of the "selfish gene." ... "No one gets too torn up about [failure] in the valley."
The traditional notion of hierarchical, top down, government has always been an imperfect match for the decentralized governance system of the US. However, much of what government does requires co-production of policy among agencies that have no formal authority over each other, fundamentally undermining the traditional Weberian image of bureaucracy. Networked governance refers to a growing body of research on the interconnectedness of essentially sovereign units, which examines how those interconnections facilitate or inhibit the functioning of the overall system. The objective of this program is two-fold: (1) to foster research on networked governance and (2) to provide a forum to discuss the challenges of networked governance.
The hottest growth area in the social sciences field is computational social science. This is often based on privileged access to electronic data sets such as e-mail records, mobile-phone call logs and web-search histories of millions of individuals.
Such studies are ushering in a revolution in the social sciences, specialists say. But there is a trade-off between the scientific interest in working with such data and concerns about privacy.
is a month old now, but I had missed this (irony?) in the first pass through:
What really tops the whole story off is that Ebbert wore the same outfit on the return flight to San Diego later that day. A female flight attendant also took note of it, according to Ebbert.
“I was complimented by the stewardess on my return flight,” she said.
