- Magnus Holm: When in Doubt, Turn to _why. A comparison of different algorithms for parsing nested parameters from a query string in Ruby. Very educational.
- Waxy.org: Pirating the 2009 Oscars. Andy Baio’s annual report on which Oscar-nominated films are available via file sharing. This year’s list is larger than ever.
- WoW Insider: Ezra Wheathoof is Thunder Bluff’s newest Elder. Ezra Chatterton was a young World of Warcraft player who died of cancer. Blizzard continues to memorialize him in the game.
- New York Times: Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers. This is fascinating but I don’t really know what to make of it.
- John Resig: OCR and Neural Nets in JavaScript. Walkthrough of a GreaseMonkey script that solves one relatively weak CAPTCHA implementation. Put this in the “I didn’t know you could do that in JavaScript” file.
January 25, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Waltz with Bashir, the Israeli animated-documentary nominee, to be published as a graphic novel. You can preview the first pages here.
Strong stuff – http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175025
January 26, 2009 at 10:50 am
the test-taking effect fits with previous research showing that, e.g., black students, when made to think of their “inferiority” (as by marking the boxes for a race-specific scholarship) perform worse on tests, while if they are given some bolus of data indicating that they’re expected to do well, they perform very close to their white counterparts. a troublesome phenomenon — performing down to expectations, in a way — but one that could respond well to the example of an “anything is possible” Presidency…