Practical Tehnology: Water Drum

The Q Drum eases the task of fetching water for peoples in developing nations. Climate change has required a countless number of people all around the world to travel greater distances to retrieve water for everyday use. The Q Drum allows a child to pull the full capacity of 50 liters of water over flat terrain with comparative ease.

Collins: McCain: a story a minute

One thing we now know for sure. Electing John McCain would be God’s gift to the profession of journalism. A story a minute.

Imagine what would happen if a new beetle infested the Iowa corn crop during the first year of a McCain administration. On Monday, we spray. On Tuesday, we firebomb. On Wednesday, the president marches barefoot through the prairie in a show of support for Iowa farmers. On Thursday, the White House reveals that Wiley Flum, a postal worker from Willimantic, Conn., has been named the new beetle eradication czar. McCain says that Flum had shown “the instincts of a maverick reformer” in personally buying a box of roach motels and scattering them around the post office locker room. “I can’t wait to introduce Wiley to those beetles in Iowa,” the president adds.

ajax: reallysimplehistory

Really Simple History is a lightweight JavaScript library for the management of bookmarking and browser history in Ajax/DHTML applications. RSH serializes application data in an internal JavaScript cache so that bookmarks and the back button can be used to return your application to an earlier state.

Map: Researchers Identify Regional Personality Traits Across America

..according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.

Warren Buffett Told You So

While the housing market was booming and derivatives were all the rage on Wall Street, it was Buffett who said they were a "time bomb, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system" and he dubbed them "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal."

America is not primarily self-sufficient Small Towns

In fact, even the "small town" of Wasilla, Alaska is fast becoming a satellite of the state's largest city. Wasilla is nestled in the Matanuska-Susitna, or Mat-Su, borough (boroughs are Alaska's equivalent of counties), and the borough is part of the Anchorage metropolitan area. Around one-third of the workers in the borough make the 50-minute commute to Anchorage to earn their living. When she's not in Juneau during the Alaska legislative session, Sarah Palin is one of those workers.

.. self-sufficient small towns don't need mass transit and high-speed rail networks, but interconnected metros do. Germany and France have already constructed fast rail connections between their major metropolitan areas, radically altering the movement of people and the facilitation of business

Brooks: Progressive Corporatism

The government will be much more active in economic management (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Democrat). Government activism will provide support to corporations, banks and business and will be used to shore up the stable conditions they need to thrive (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Republican). Tax revenues from business activities will pay for progressive but business-friendly causes — investments in green technology, health care reform, infrastructure spending, education reform and scientific research.

If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We’re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We’re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.

How We Became the United States of France

This is the state of our great republic: We've nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We're about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they're a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future where too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national healthcare? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food.

The Django Debug Toolbar

I created the Django Debug Toolbar similarly with a single toolbar that contained many panels. The toolbar itself is a piece of middleware that instantiates each panel object on request, and performs processing and rendering as the response is being written back to the browser. In this way it is essentially a set of middleware classes (the panels) grouped together to display a single toolbar. Each panel subclasses a base panel class and overrides a few methods to render the toolbar.

Interactive Motion Charts

In addition to Motion Chart from Google, Gapminder is now starting a community for those urging to share and turn their time series of statistical indicators for countries of the world into Gapminder-like bubble graph on their website. The community use a system powered by Trendalyzer and Google spreadsheet.

Related

• Motion chart lets you create your own chart from data you have published on a Google Spreadsheet.

Megyn Kelly and Bill O'Reilly on Palin Email Hack

Megyn Kelly explains to Bill O'Reilly (despite being talked over several times) that the website that published Sarah Palin's emails qualifies as a news organizations and is not subject to prosecution.

Ahmadinejad Video Editing

Allegations that the CBS Mike Wallace interview engaged in misleading editing.

(Page has annoying Nader video track that starts up further down the page)

Time: What Happens When We Die?

Last week, Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S., and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project's origins, its skeptics, and the difference between the mind and the brain.

Blue-Torch Ultralight Backpackers Alcohol Stove Demo

Blue-Torch Ultralight Backpackers Alcohol Stove Demo

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• Trangia Simmer Control

Future Financing of Indispensable Firms

Going forward, investors should understand that firms that are too big to fail are too big to be debt-financed, and government enforcement of debt claims against such firms will be limited.

Important questions for your prospective employer

You’re in an interview, getting asked dozens of questions. At the end of the interview, the interviewer asks if you have any questions about the company. Heck yeah! This is your time to learn about the company. Getting hired is a commitment from you AND the company.

vesti.ru: Russina News Site

Russian news site

Why is the U.S. exporting gasoline and diesel?

With gasoline prices zooming toward $4 a gallon — and beyond — readers are looking for relief and explanations. If fuel is in such short supply, why are refiners shipping some of it out of the country?

Brooks: On Prudent Experience

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right.

A quick way to build Graphviz and Pygraphviz

Eric Holscher put up a nice screencast Saturday on using the excellent django command extensions. I've used it before but wasn't aware of all the nice features the guys had built into it so I needed to get my Mac up to speed with graphviz. Fine and dandy but pygraphviz didn't play nicely with the graphviz images available, so I needed to build it.

django-batchadmin

Batch actions in the change list views of your Django admin site

Brooks: Less Individualistic Conservatism

Conservatism’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?” Goldwater’s vision was highly individualistic and celebrated a certain sort of person — the stout pioneer crossing the West, the risk-taking entrepreneur with a vision, the stalwart hero fighting the collectivist foe.

..locked in the old framework, the Republican Party’s knee-jerk response to many problems is: “Throw a voucher at it.” Schools are bad. Throw a voucher. Health care system’s a mess. Replace it with federally funded individual choice. Economic anxiety? Lower some tax rate.

The latest example of the mismatch between ideology and reality is the housing crisis. The party’s individualist model cannot explain the social contagion that caused hundreds of thousands of individuals to make bad decisions in the same direction at the same time. A Republican administration intervened gigantically in the market to handle the Bear Stearns, Freddie and Fannie debacles. But it has no conservative rationale to explain its action, no language about the importance of social equilibrium it might use to justify itself.

Money Matters: Marriage Tips

Talk and share goals before walking down the aisle, couples should have a talk about their financial health and goals. They should ask each other tough questions: Do we want children? When? Who will care for them? Will they go to public or private school? What kind of life do we want? When will we retire?

“In my ideal plan for couples, they would have a meeting every week on their finances,” said Karen Altfest, a financial planner who runs the New York firm L. J. Altfest & Company, with her husband, Lewis. “That way, they are in sync with each other’s goals.”

Share responsibilities, too. Though one partner tends to control the finances, advisers recommend rotating tasks. One person should handle investments for a certain period, while the other pays the bills; rotate and repeat.

Orderable inlines using drag and drop with jQuery UI

An easy way of making inlines orderable using drag-and-drop, using jQuery UI's sortable() plugin. First, add an "order" field to the inline models which is an IntegerField, and set that model to use 'order' as its default order_by.

How Democrats Alienate Republicans

A Durkheimian ethos can't be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest.

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally.

django cms

django-cms is a free, BSD-licensed content management system for Django.

Armstrong Confirms Comeback Plan

Armstrong said racing in the Leadville Trail 100, a 100-mile mountain bike race in August, spurred his interest in returning to the sport. In the Vanity Fair article, Armstrong said the Olympic triumphs of older athletes like the 41-year-old swimmer Dara Torres and the 38-year-old marathoner Constantina Tomescu-Dita showed him that it would be possible for him to return to racing even stronger than ever.

“Older athletes are performing very well,” Armstrong told the historian and journalist Douglas Brinkley. “Ask serious sports physiologists and they’ll tell you age is a wives’ tale. Athletes at 30, 35 mentally get tired. They’ve done their sport for 20, 25 years and they’re like, I’ve had enough. But there’s no evidence to support that when you’re 38 you’re any slower than when you were 32.”

Bridging the Gap between Relational Databases and MapReduce: Three New Approaches

The second approach is to integrate Map Reduce with a SQL database. Two database companies have recently announced support for MapReduce: Greenplum and Aster Data. Interestingly, they have taken two very different approaches. I will call Greenplum's approach "loose coupling" and Aster Data's approach "tight coupling". Let's examine each in turn.

A Profile of Online Profiles

Below are some graphs from his report. Note how almost all women understate their weight and most men overstate their height. Typical.

Media Bias? Not if This Web Site Can Help It

A beta version of SpinSpotter, initially accessible only through the Firefox browser, goes live at spinspotter.com on Sept. 8, as does a downloadable toolbar application the company call Spinoculars. When turned on in a user's Web browser's toolbar, Spinoculars scans Web pages and spots certain potential indicators of bias. The toolbar also will allow its users to flag phrases in news stories and opine on those called out by other Spinspotter users. The application's algorithms work off six key tenets of spin and bias, which the company derived from both the guidelines of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code Of Ethics and input from an advisory board composed of journalism luminaries.

The Glass Cliff: Are Women Leaders Set up to Fail

With the recent dismissal/demotion of Erin Callan (Lehman Brothers), Zoe Cruz (Morgan Stanley), and Sallie Krawcheck (Citi), a 2005 article in the British Journal of Management entitled "The Glass Cliff: Evidence that Women are Over-Represented in Precarious Leadership Positions" is being scrutinized anew.

Oil wealth masks challenges facing Alaska economy

Oil dwarfs other revenue-generating industries in Alaska, accounting for 8.9 billion dollars, or 65.7 percent of total state revenue in the fiscal year that ended June 30 and 81 percent when the 2.5 billion Alaska received from the federal government that year is excluded, official figures show.

The Words Used at the Convention

Illustration of word usage at recent Democratic and Republican Presidential Conventions: Number of times words spoken per 25,000 words.

Website tries getting groups organized

Anyone who's ever tried to organize a group purchase, event or boycott knows it can be like herding cats. A Chicago company is taking on that challenge with a Web-based tool for organizing the masses.

FileMerge for Mac: Diff Tool

FileMerge is one of the old NeXT Developer applications that survived into the days of Mac OS X, and with good reason: It kicks the pants off anything else when it comes to quickly going through file changes, marking them on the scrollba, allowing you to breeze through them with parallax scrolling, and merging them with a single click

Related

• Using FileMerge with Subversion
• Guiffy Compare
• Versions SVN Client without Merge
• Subcommander

Displaying div on top of flash object

I need to display a div that may overlap or float on top of a flash object and Im having some real problems with this. The floating div displays beneath the flash object. Its like the old problem with displaying an iframe over a select element.

Related

• Mozilla Forum Post

Russia On Alaskan Oil Drilling

Palin’s nomination for vice president and her desire to allow drilling in the Alaskan wilderness “reminded me of a lunch I had three and half years ago with one of the Russian trade attachés,” global trade consultant Edward Goldberg said to me. “After much wine, this gentleman told me that his country was very pleased that the Bush administration wanted to drill in the Alaskan wilderness. In his opinion, the amount of product one could actually derive from there was negligible in terms of needs. However, it signified that the Bush administration was not planning to do anything to create alternative energy, which of course would threaten the economic growth of Russia.”

Proposed: Treat Stop Signs like Yield Signs

As a follow up to my post the other day [Why Bicyclists Hate Stop Signs], I wanted to point out that the SF Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission is currently looking at the feasibility of a “stop and roll” law for California cyclists, similar to the one in Idaho. If it eventually goes through, cyclists would be able to treat stop signs as yield signs, and red lights as stop signs.

Related

• Why Bicyclists Hate Stop Signs

Worldmapper: World Map Cartograms

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, using equal area cartograms where territories are re-sized on each map according to a particular variable.

The process of creating an equal area cartogram is not a trivial one, and has occupied researchers for decades.

Brooks: What the Palin Pick Says

My worry about Palin is that she shares McCain’s primary weakness — that she has a tendency to substitute a moral philosophy for a political philosophy.

There are some issues where the most important job is to rally the armies of decency against the armies of corruption: Confronting Putin, tackling earmarks and reforming the process of government.

But most issues are not confrontations between virtue and vice. Most problems — the ones Barack Obama is sure to focus on like health care reform and economic anxiety — are the product of complex conditions. They require trade-offs and policy expertise. They are not solvable through the mere assertion of sterling character.