Tag: via Instapaper
January 30, 2012
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The Unselfish Gene – Harvard Business Review
The Idea in Brief Executives, like most other people, have long believed that human beings are interested only in advancing their material interests. However, recent research in evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, political science, and experimental economics suggests that people behave far…
January 29, 2012
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You Got Gamified! How Our Government Runs Like Foursquare | The Awl
The Awl Be less stupid. The Awl Be less stupid.
January 28, 2012
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The War for Catch-22 | Culture | Vanity Fair
CORRECTION APPENDED Adapted from Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, by Tracy Daugherty © 2011 by Tracy Daugherty. I. Prologue J oseph Heller crawled into the transparent womb at the front of the B-25. It was August 15, 1944. He was about to fly his second mission of the day. That morning,…
January 27, 2012
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Was Aaron Swartz Stealing? | The Awl
Maria Bustillos change my mind The Awl Be less stupid.
January 26, 2012
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Online commenting: the age of rage | Technology | The Observer
Websites are increasingly encouraging readers to leave comments, but with users able to hide behind aliases, often such attempts at discussion end in hate-filled bile and a mob mentality. Photograph: Sami Sarkis/Getty F or a while after his first TV series was broadcast in 2009, comedian Stewart Lee…
January 25, 2012
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– B. HOCKEY J. – 13
My son turned 13 today and I didn’t write a post called “13” because I was blocked. I still am. But here’s the thing. Writer’s block always contains the seeds of its own demise. It can block you from what you want to write about but it can’t block you from writing about writer’s block itself. When…
January 24, 2012
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Rogue Academic Downloader Busted by MIT Webcam Stakeout, Arrest Report Says | Threat Level | Wired.com
Hacker and activist Aaron Swartz faces federal hacking prosecution for allegedly downloading millions of academic documents via MIT’s guest network, using a laptop hidden in a networking closet. Swartz, 24, faces 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine under the indictment, announced last week ,…
January 23, 2012
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Space exploration: The end of the Space Age | The Economist
Inner space is useful. Outer space is history HOW big is the Earth? Any encyclopedia will give you an answer: its equatorial diameter is 12,756km, or, for those who prefer to think that way, 7,926 miles. Ah, but then there is the atmosphere. Should that count? Perhaps the planet’s true diameter is…
January 22, 2012
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The Loudness Wars: Is Music’s Noisy Arms Race Over? – Mike Barthel – Entertainment – The Atlantic
High-volume sound engineering may finally be falling out of fashion Flickr user Erica Cassella Sleigh Bells The loudest album of 2010 was almost certainly Sleigh Bells’ acclaimed Treats , a collection of songs with the volume and distortion of nearly every element pushed into the red. Drums became…
January 21, 2012
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Why Google+ will succeed wildly. At first. – Good Experience
Google+ is going to succeed. At least that’s what I’ve been telling people when they ask my opinion of the service. The cleverly designed interface, and the immediate popularity among influential techies (due in no small part to the lack of a Facebook logo), all point to a hit in the making. The…
January 20, 2012
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An Academic Author’s Unintentional Masterpiece – NYTimes.com
Illustration by Stephen Doyle In this column I want to look at a not uncommon way of writing and structuring books. This approach, I will argue, involves the writer announcing at the outset what he or she will be doing in the pages that follow. The default format of academic research papers and…
January 19, 2012
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Daring Fireball: The iPad’s Dominance of the Tablet Market
So this new report from the consulting firm Strategy Analytics , “Global Tablet OS Market Share: Q2 2011”, came out yesterday and made some news today: 1 Peter King, Director at Strategy Analytics, said, “Global tabletshipments reached 15.1 million units in Q2 2011, surging 331percent from 3.5…
January 18, 2012
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50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education
April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released. I won’t be celebrating. The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous…
January 17, 2012
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Digital Oxytocin: How Trust Keeps Facebook, Twitter Humming | Fast Company
The most surprising takeaway from the recent Pew Research Center study, " Social Networking Sites and Our Lives ," wasn’t that 80% of Americans regularly use the Internet or that 60% of web users have a social network account—double the number in 2008, with the vast majority on Facebook (52%) and…
January 16, 2012
January 15, 2012
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When science is hidden behind a smokescreen | Science | Guardian Weekly
A corpus of research funded by the tobacco industry seems to have affected attitudes to the real dangers of smoking. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian R obert Proctor, of Stanford University, coined the term "agnotology" in 1992, when he realised we are much more interested in producing…
January 14, 2012
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Atheists should study gay political playbook – The Spirited Atheist – The Washington Post
A Southern California synagogue dedicated to the idea that there is no God exemplifies America’s recent turn toward secularism. Is that a good thing? Nones on a Mission Why I’m drawn to the religion of the Nones. Jesus Is a None: 5 Things Christians Need to Know About the “Nones” If Jesus had to…
January 13, 2012
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Christina Cacioppo : The art of community management
Last week, Phil Strazzulla asked me to define a “community manager” in less than 140 characters. I gave it a shot: That screen capture is courtesy of David Noël , a community manager whom I respect tremendously. Community management is a role that hadn’t existed before the rise of one-to-many…
January 12, 2012
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The Technium: Technological Superstition
[Translations: Japanese ] Superstition is alive and well in the high tech world. It is visible most prominently in our technological artifacts, some of which we treat like medieval relics. Recently, supernatural superstition has crept into American treatment of 9/11. The genius of modern mass…
January 11, 2012
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Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic « Clay Shirky
The business environment for newspapers continues to be grim. Pew recently reported that advertising revenue rebounded in 2010 for all forms of media, except newspapers. * This might just be a matter of transitioning from print to digital revenues but for the fact that the market values a print…
January 10, 2012
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DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, IN HIS OWN WORDS | More Intelligent Life
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two…
January 9, 2012
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The Illusions of Psychiatry by Marcia Angell | The New York Review of Books
United Artists/Photofest Mimi Sarkisian, Louise Fletcher, and Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , 1975 In my article in the last issue, I focused mainly on the recent books by psychologist Irving Kirsch and journalist Robert Whitaker, and what they tell us about the epidemic of…
January 8, 2012
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The Shocking True Tale Of The Mad Genius Who Invented Sea-Monkeys | The Awl
The Awl Be less stupid. The Awl Be less stupid.
January 7, 2012
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Feedback Loops Are Changing What People Do | Magazine
In 2003, officials in Garden Grove, California, a community of 170,000 people wedged amid the suburban sprawl of Orange County, set out to confront a problem that afflicts most every town in America: drivers speeding through school zones. Local authorities had tried many tactics to get people to…
January 6, 2012
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Michele Bachmann’s Holy War | Rolling Stone Politics
Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don’t laugh. It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing…
January 5, 2012
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David Means: “Tree Line, Kansas, 1934” : The New Yorker
Credit Illustration by Rutu Modan Five days of trading the field glasses and taking turns crawling back into the trees to smoke out of sight. Five days on surveillance, waiting to see if by some chance Carson might return to his uncle’s farm. Five days of listening to the young agent, named Barnes,…
January 4, 2012
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The Technium: The Clock in the Mountain
A work crane at the Clock site in western Texas. There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has…
January 3, 2012
January 2, 2012
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Sound recordings: The sound of silence | The Economist
Sound recordings THE sound of Thomas Edison’s first recorded words in 1877 are lost, but he said they were , "Mary had a little lamb". Had the cylinder containing that utterance survived, it would remain firmly under copyright protection in America at least until 2067. A quirk of the federal…
January 1, 2012
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Kind of Screwed – Waxy.org
TL;DR version: Last year, I was threatened with a lawsuit over the pixel art album cover for Kind of Bloop . Despite my firm belief that I was legally in the right, I settled out of court to cut my losses. This ordeal was very nerve-wracking for me and my family, and I’ve had trouble writing about…