Jason Kottke makes some interesting points about quoting and attribution and blogs that you should read. I’d quote the good parts, but when you read the post, you’ll see why I didn’t. Be sure to read Andy Baio’s post on AllThingsD’s content appropriation for background.
I’ve been reading less political news lately. I’m trying to focus on building stuff and learning new ways to build stuff, and that’s crowded most of the political feeds out of my reader. But I still do check in a little every day, and one thing I’m seeing a lot of is effusive praise for the defense budget reforms that President Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have proposed. Here’s where it’s important to remember that Gates was President Bush’s Secretary of Defense and that Barack Obama asked him to stay on. ...
Former bank regulator William Black names fraud as the cause of financial crisis. I really liked his definition: Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, “I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value.” And as a result, there’s no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that’s what we have. My complaint about this is that it seems everyone involved was mostly deceiving themselves. People applied for subprime and Alt-A loans so they could move into houses they couldn’t otherwise afford (or to buy houses as investments in hopes of selling them at a profit). Banks sold those loans knowing that people would lie because there was insatiable demand for mortgage-backed securities. Investors bought these securities because they kept going up in value regardless of how crappy they were. ...
I don’t actually want to be a designer or a usability expert, but I’d like to know more about design and usability. I’m always working on various kinds of Web pages – content pages, listing pages, reports, forms, and so forth. My specialty is server-side programming, but I spend enough time on the output side that I’d like to be better at it. So where to start? Is Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information the best place to start? What are the other good options? I’m not trying to put anyone out of a job, but I’d like the things I build myself to look less terrible. ...
Bruce Schneier flags a new study in which computer science researchers traced “anonymized” data from social sites back to the real people it is associated with. Interestingly they identify people not through the content that they post but rather through the social graph – they figure out who people are based on who their friends are and who their friends’ friends are. The researchers are the same ones published a paper last year about de-anonymizing some of the data in the Netflix Prize dataset using a different approach. ...
Alex Payne on online technical debate: In practice, the conversations that are most widely heard in the tech community are full of inaccuracies, manufactured drama, ignorance, and unbridled opinion. In discussing these Internet-spanning debates with non-technical friends, comparisons to Hollywood tabloids come first to mind. It’s a time sink for an industry that should be a shining example of how to use the newest of media for constructive debate. Tim Bray weighs in citing Sturgeon’s Law – 90% of everything is crap, which works both ways. Yeah, most everything is crap, but a bigger pie leads to more crap, but more non-crap too. A rising tide lifts all boats. ...
Roger Ebert wrote a remarkable recollection of the culture of the newsroom that any fan of newspapers should read. The future of the newspaper business is bleak, but its past is indisputably glorious.
From the “it’s worse than it appears” department: the percentage of men over age 20 with jobs is the lowest it has been since the Bureau of Labor and Statistics started keeping track after World War II. (The fact that the population is aging explains this to a certain degree, but it’s still surprising.)
As I discussed a few days ago, I’m always open to a better offer when it comes to tools. Yesterday, Dan Croak write a massive post describing how to set up OS X for Ruby on Rails development. In the post he points to dot files shared on GitHub by Joe Ferris, and mentions that the shell they use is zsh (an alternative to bash that’s based on ksh). I started wondering about the allure of zsh – I’ve used bash for a long time, and when I started using it, it was the most powerful shell around. I figured that if people were leaving bash for zsh, there must be some compelling reason, and I decided to do some research. ...
Scott Rosenberg reposts a piece on MP3 from 2000. Here’s my favorite sentence: Today, though, “having” a new music release is beginning to mean something as vague as having a particular file on your computer’s hard drive. Here in 2009, the idea that having something means that it exists as a file doesn’t seem vague to most people at all. I don’t think it seemed vague to me back then, either. This also led me to wonder when I first encountered MP3 – I know for sure I started using WinAmp in 1997. ...