Art by Nina Katchadourian:

The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public book collections. The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library's focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies — a cross-section of that library's holdings. At present, the Sorted Books project comprises more than 130 book clusters.

The Sorted Books Project

We show that it is extremely difficult to devise incentive schemes that distinguish between fund managers who cannot deliver excess returns from those who can, unless investors have specific knowledge of the investment strategies being employed. Using a ‘performance‐mimicking’ argument, we show that any fee structure that does not assess penalties for underperformance can be gamed by unskilled managers to generate fees that are at least as high, per dollar of expected returns, as the fees of the most skilled managers. We show further that standard proposals to reform the fee structure, such as imposing high water marks, delaying managers’ bonus payments, forcing them to hold an equity stake, or assessing penalties for underperformance, are not enough to separate the skilled from the unskilled. We conclude that skilled managers will have to find ways other than their track records to distinguish themselves from the unskilled, or else the latter may drive out the former as in a classic lemons market.

From the Brookings Institution.

The Hedge Fund Game

Scirate.com is a new experimental website for trying to deal with the information torrent hoisted upon the typical scientist who attempts to keep up with the latest and greatest in his or her research field. The basic idea is for the site to work as a sort of filter for the daily listings of new papers appearing on the internet. In particular, the site is currently set up to work most closely with the arxiv.org a preprint depository which has daily postings of new papers. By adopting the model of such websites as digg.com users can vote for a paper. These votes then influence which papers are displayed in a given listing. As a larger and larger userbase grows, it is hoped that the effect of this voting will allow users to confidently be directed to the most important papers published in each listing. Of course there must always be a group of people who are considering each paper, so the real hope is that the amortized work involved will improve under such a voting system.

One question which is usually brought up is why one should vote for a paper? Do you need to read the paper before you vote for it? Most probably the website will function much like other such social websites: people will vote for papers that they find interesting without having read the paper, but probably after having read the abstract.

Scirate

Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs.

Clojure

Now available:

Get ready to race at blazing speeds and experience futuristic, adrenaline-filled racing action! The iconic anti-gravity racing franchise is back and moving at light speed with WipEout® HD. Delivering 1080p High Definition visuals running at a breathtaking 60 frames per second, WipEout HD features a selection of the best tracks taken from previous versions of the wipEout franchise, meticulously crafted and fully reworked to showcase the processing power of PS3. Features eight racing teams, classic tracks from previous Wipeout releases, five gameplay modes, plus 8-player online racing and Trophy support, all set to a hard-hitting techno soundtrack of nine fully-licensed music tracks remixed in Dolby™ 5.1 surround sound.

wipEout HD

Creating institutions to meet the challenge of sustainability is arguably the most important task confronting society; it is also dauntingly complex. Ecological, economic, and social elements all play a role, but despite ongoing efforts, researchers have yet to succeed in integrating the various disciplines in a way that gives adequate representation to the insights of each.

Panarchy, a term devised to describe evolving hierarchical systems with multiple interrelated elements, offers an important new framework for understanding and resolving this dilemma. Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal. These transformational cycles take place at scales ranging from a drop of water to the biosphere, over periods from days to geologic epochs. By understanding these cycles and their scales, researchers can identify the points at which a system is capable of accepting positive change, and can use those leverage points to foster resilience and sustainability within the system.

This volume brings together leading thinkers on the subject-including Fikret Berkes, Buz Brock, Steve Carpenter, Carl Folke, Lance Gunderson, C.S. Holling, Don Ludwig, Karl-Göran Mäler, Charles Perrings, Marten Scheffer, Brian Walker, and Frances Westley-to develop and examine the concept of panarchy and to consider how it can be applied to human, natural, and human-natural systems. Throughout, contributors seek to identify adaptive approaches to management that recognize uncertainty and encourage innovation while fostering resilience.

The book is a fundamental new development in a widely acclaimed line of inquiry. It represents the first step in integrating disciplinary knowledge for the adaptive management of human-natural systems across widely divergent scales, and offers an important base of knowledge from which institutions for adaptive management can be developed. It will be an invaluable source of ideas and understanding for students, researchers, and professionals involved with ecology, conservation biology, ecological economics, environmental policy, or related fields.

Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems

It's not so much about the demand. It's about the supply. Or, rather, the fight to be your supplier.

I will say this again: this is to stymie services like Hulu, NetFlix and Amazon On-Demand.

Recently:

What service providers publicly promise to do, if they are given complete control of their networks, is to build special facilities for streaming movies. But there are two fatal defects to that promise. One is that movies are unlikely to offer all that much revenue. The other is that delivering movies in real-time streaming mode is the wrong solution, expensive and unnecessary.

If service providers are to derive significant revenues and profits by exploiting freedom from net neutrality limitations, they will need to engage in much more intrusive control of traffic than just provision of special channels for streaming movies.

And from way back:

Just a few short months ago, it seemed that humanity stood on the edge of a communications revolution. Now a grim face replaces yesterday's optimism.

Something fundamental is at work. The situation has been shaped by a paradox inherent in the very nature of the new technology:

The best network is the hardest one to make money running.

This is the Paradox of the Best Network.

Comcast Metered Broadband Official; Beware What You Download

Dale Meyerrose, associate director of national intelligence:

To fully realize the value of information sharing — our principal component as we transform to provide better support for our nation’s protection — we must transition from net-centricity to data-centricity.

Giving attention to data and metadata management strategies and ensuring alignment with the applications-development uses of metadata can provide benefits and continue to drive the intelligence community toward realizing the full value of information sharing.

Making the most of information sharing

The HBO series The Wire, a panoramic view of Baltimore through its drug world, schools, government, seaport, and newspaper, has been widely acknowledged as one of the greatest television dramas ever produced. To mark the release of the final season on DVD, the Museum of the Moving Image presented a panel, Making "The Wire", with David Simon, the series creator and co-producer; novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, who wrote several episodes; and four of the show's stars: Seth Gilliam (who played Ellis Carver), Clark Johnson (city editor Gus Haynes), Clarke Peters (Lester Freemon), and Wendell Pierce ("Bunk"), moderated by David Schwartz, Chief Curator.

Making 'The Wire'

Joel Spolsky, in Inc.:

Frankly, people here seem to be happier with a little bit of middle management. Not middle management that's going to overrule the decisions they make on their own. Not symbolic middle management that only makes people feel important. But middle management that creates useful channels of communication. If my job is getting obstacles out of the way so my employees can get their work done, these managers exist so that, when an employee has a local problem, there's someone there, in the office next door, whom they can talk to.

From the archive:

The spread of ES has resulted in a declining emphasis on creativity and ingenuity of workers, and the destruction of a sense of community in the workplace by the ceaseless reengineering of the way businesses operate. The concept of a career has become increasingly meaningless in a setting in which employees have neither skills of which they might be proud nor an audience of independently minded fellow workers that might recognize their value.

...

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

How I Learned to Love Middle Managers