I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them.
I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity.
With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog..
Less than a month ago we moved that single file off to CacheFly a low-priced CDN. I thought CacheFly would be an interim solution but from our performance testing they seem to be a good longer term option.
For this round of testing I tested the following serving options:
The basic premise is straightforward: The software makes predictions about what will happen — about how a checkers game will unfold for example — and then compares these predictions with what actually happens. If the prediction is right, that series of predictions gets reinforced. However, if the prediction is wrong, the software reevaluates its representation of the game.
Montague was entranced by these software prototypes. "It was just so clearly the most efficient way to learn," he says. The problem was that TDRL remained purely theoretical, a system both elegant and imaginary. Even though computer scientists had begun to adapt the programming strategy for various practical purposes, such as running a bank of elevators or determining flight schedules, no one had found a neurological system that worked like this.
But one spring day in 1991, Dayan burst into Montague's small office. "He was very excited and shoved these figures from some new paper in my face," Montague remembers. "He kept on saying to me, 'What does this look like? What does this look like?'" The figures were from Schultz's experiments with dopamine neurons, and they showed how these cells reacted to the tone and the juice.
The correct solution is Undo, which we can implement here with an event queue and an “onUnload” callback. When the user clicks delete, the to-do item disappears. Normally, at this point we would send an AJAX request to the server to actually delete the item. When writing for Undo, instead of immediately sending the AJAX call, we delay until the user navigates away from the current page (which we detect using the “onUnload” callback). This is achieved by placing a reference to the to-do item in the event queue for safe keeping.
When a user clicks Undo, we pop the last item added to the event queue and make the related to-do item visible again. When the user navigates away from the page, or closes it, the “onUnload” event gets called. It’s at this point that we iterate through the event queue and send the AJAX requests to server-side delete the to-do items.
The opening chord to "A Hard Day’s Night" is also famous because, for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing.
There were theories aplenty and musicians, scholars and amateur guitar players all gave it a try, but it took a Dalhousie mathematician to figure out the exact formula.
The first time I got a letter in the mail from Who’s Who saying that they wanted to include me, I thought I was pretty special. I had just gotten my Ph.D. and was at the Harvard Society of Fellows at the time. I called my Dad to brag.
He laughed out loud at me. “Only fools put themselves in Who’s Who,” he said. “They ask me every year, and I never fill out the form.”
uSwitch.com is a free, impartial online and phone based comparison and switching service that helps customers compare prices on a range of services including gas, electricity, home phone, broadband providers and personal finance products.
On a continent that has been dominated by the rule of men, this tiny East African nation is trying something new.
Here, women are not only driving the economy -- working on construction sites, in factories and as truck and taxi drivers -- they are also filling the ranks of government.
I can't think of any country in the world that has no fiscal deficit, no trade deficit and no inflation – except Canada. I think the Canadian dollar should go through parity.
“I like the whole Canadian market. I don't particularly dig the banks because I just don't know what's in there [on the balance sheet]. But I'd say virtually everything else is fine.”
It’s not a big new feature but it’s certainly one that will come in handy: YouTube will now allow you to send users to a specific point in a video by appending a short tag to the end of a video’s URL. It’s pretty surprising that this functionality wasn’t available earlier, as Google Video introduced the same feature over two years ago. YouTube users have been forced to rely on third party services like Splicd to do the same thing.
To specify a point, append a tag to the end of your video link with the following syntax: “#t=1m45s” (you can change the numbers before the ‘m’ and ’s’ to edit the minutes and seconds, respectively.
In fact, his own statements show that he has been on both sides of a host of vital issues: the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax, waterboarding, hunting down terrorists in Pakistan, kicking Russia out of the G-8, a surge of troops into Afghanistan, the GI Bill, storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, teaching intelligent design, fully funding No Child Left Behind, offshore drilling, his own immigration policy and withdrawal timelines for Iraq.
In March, McCain insisted to The Wall Street Journal that he is "always for less regulation." In September, with the government forced to bail out the nation's largest insurance companies and brokerage houses, McCain declared that he would regulate the financial industry and end the "casino culture on Wall Street." He did a similar about-face on Bush's tax cuts, opposing them when he planned to run against Bush in 2001, then declaring that he wants to make them larger — and permanent — when he needed to win the support of anti-tax conservatives this year. "It's a big flip-flop," conceded tax abolitionist Grover Norquist. "But I'm happy he's flopped."
Growing inequality in US cities could lead to widespread social unrest and increased mortality, says a new United Nations report on the urban environment.
"High levels of inequality can lead to negative social, economic and political consequences that have a destabilising effect on societies," said the report. "[They] create social and political fractures that can develop into social unrest and insecurity."
To: Voters Under 35
Subject: Your Future
Recommendation: Get Angry
You're being played for chumps. Barack Obama and John McCain want your votes, but they're ignoring your interests. You face a heavily mortgaged future. You'll pay Social Security and Medicare for aging baby boomers. The needed federal tax increase might total 50 percent over the next 25 years.
After that first brief meeting, Davis remained in discreet but frequent contact with Palin and her staff — gathering tapes of speeches and interviews, as he was doing with all potential vice-presidential candidates. One tape in particular struck Davis as arresting: an interview with Palin and Gov. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona Democrat, on “The Charlie Rose Show” that was shown in October 2007. Reviewing the tape, it didn’t concern Davis that Palin seemed out of her depth on health-care issues or that, when asked to name her favorite candidate among the Republican field, she said, “I’m undecided.” What he liked was how she stuck to her pet issues — energy independence and ethics reform — and thereby refused to let Rose manage the interview. This was the case throughout all of the Palin footage. Consistency. Confidence. And . . . well, look at her. A friend had said to Davis: “The way you pick a vice president is, you get a frame of Time magazine, and you put the pictures of the people in that frame. You look at who fits that frame best — that’s your V. P.”
OJR: What is the value to a journalist in understanding programming, or even learning how to do it?
Holovaty: The main value in understanding programming is the advantage of knowing what's possible, in terms of both data analysis and data presentation. It helps one think of journalism beyond the plain (and kind of boring) format of the news story.
Programming comes in handy in all sorts of other areas, too, including gathering information. Now that quite a few governments and organizations are publishing data on their own websites, it's a valuable skill to be able to automate the retrieval of that data and compile it into a format that makes it easy to research and aggregate.
Dan Gross, writing in Slate, has a theory: “The more Starbucks a country has, the bigger its financial problems.”
He has data that seem to support the theory, at least in a general way, and adds that it works in the United States, where the biggest busts have come in areas with the most Starbucks.
Before our eyes, the Arctic is changing from an impenetrable wasteland into an oceanic crossroads. The polar ice cap has lost up to half its thickness near the North Pole in just the past six years and may have passed a tipping point; it is now shrinking at more than three times the rate predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only four years ago. At the current pace, the Arctic may well be ice-free in summer by 2013.
The opening of a new waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is akin in historic significance to the opening of the Suez Canal, in 1869, or is Panamanian cousin, in 1914. With this sea change will come the rise and fall of international seaports, newfound access to nearly a quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas reserves, and a recalibration of geo-strategic power.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s way of dealing with the general economic distress has been to increase government spending, primarily through imports. But the International Monetary Fund said in August that Iran would face unsustainable deficits should prices for its oil fall to $75 a barrel.
It is not expected that economics will force Iran to change its underlying ideology or long-term goals. Still, if prices stay depressed for long, it could mean a greater willingness in Tehran to find a compromise on the nuclear issue and, perhaps, a political shift that left Mr. Ahmadinejad vulnerable in June’s presidential election, analysts said.
She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.
The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the "Afghan girl," and for 17 years no one knew her name.
Trouble is, Barack Obama’s biography is not very interesting. Hillary Clinton, at least, worked with actual radicals at a time when radicalism was a going concern. But Obama? McCain’s attack on him is the equivalent of the William McKinley campaign attacking William Jennings Bryan for having kept company with Nathan Bedford Forrest decades after the Civil War. Yes, the old rebel was an unrepentant traitor. Mostly though, he was all washed up.
Republicans have been fighting this second American civil war for eleven election cycles now. It’s been a good run! But just as 19th-Century Republicans eventually ran out of Union generals from Ohio, so the modern Republican Party has bumped up against the statute of limitations on campaigns against hippies.
McCain needed a bigger message.
So think about it: Some mortgage broker in Los Angeles gives subprime “liar loans” to people who have no credit ratings so they can buy homes in Southern California. Those flimsy mortgages get globalized through the global banking system and, when they go sour, they eventually prompt banks to stop lending, fearful that every other bank’s assets are toxic, too. The credit crunch hits Iceland, which went on its own binge. Meanwhile, the police department of Northumbria, England, had invested some of its extra cash in Iceland, and, now that those accounts are frozen, it may have to reduce street patrols this weekend.
And therein lies the central truth of globalization today: We’re all connected and nobody is in charge.
Instead, we've been hearing for most of the past year about "systemic risk" -- the notion that allowing one firm to fail will cause a cascade that will take down otherwise healthy companies in its wake.
Ms. Schwartz doesn't buy it. "It's very easy when you're a market participant," she notes with a smile, "to claim that you shouldn't shut down a firm that's in really bad straits because everybody else who has lent to it will be injured. Well, if they lent to a firm that they knew was pretty rocky, that's their responsibility. And if they have to be denied repayment of their loans, well, they wished it on themselves. The [government] doesn't have to save them, just as it didn't save the stockholders and the employees of Bear Stearns. Why should they be worried about the creditors? Creditors are no more worthy of being rescued than ordinary people, who are really innocent of what's been going on."
There has never been a moment when, at least in public, he seems gripped by inner turmoil. It’s not willpower or self-discipline he shows as much as an organized unconscious. Through some deep, bottom-up process, he has developed strategies for equanimity, and now he’s become a homeostasis machine.
.. it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather — already has gathered — some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.
I've been browsing under the linux platform since about 1943, and one of my pet peeves has been encountering websites that didn't work because their main navigation menu was hidden under some Flash content! ;)
Well, it turns out I just made one of those sites! And so I spent the better half of the afternoon figuring out how to get my drop down SuperFish submenus menu to appear OVER a Flash Movie. Here's what I found;
Well, a major motivation that people have put forward for cutting taxes is their concern that government is too large. They think that the direct approach of going through the political process to cut spending is very difficult, and so the best strategy is to cut taxes. The idea is that this will reduce the revenues that Congress has available, and over time that will force spending down.
.. Right. Tax cuts led, eventually, to tax increases. Basically, something has to give; there is a government budget constraint. What we thought gave when you cut taxes was spending, but we seem to find that in postwar U.S. history what actually gives is the tax cut itself. A substantial fraction of a tax cut is typically undone in the subsequent five years.
The Republican party also had the opportunity to change their platform language on abortion this year. The draft sent out to delegates last week contained this phrase,
"We invite all persons of good will, whether across the political aisle or within our party, to work together to reduce the incidence of abortion..."
However, when the committee met to approve and finalize the wording, this sentence, about working to reduce the incidence of abortion, had been removed.
The big lesson for Wall Street is that lending against collateral, supposedly prudent, can blind you to the need for checking the repayment capacity of borrowers. US banks happily gave mortgages of 100% of the value of houses during the housing bubble, and suffered when house prices fell.
Microfinance, by contrast, has no collateral at all. MFIs deliberately keep loans small, well within repayment capacity. Some MFIs give first loans of just Rs 5,000 a year. Those who repay qualify for a higher second loan, maybe Rs 7,000, and the third loan can be still higher. But MFIs set an absolute loan limit, ranging from Rs 12,000 to Rs 25,000, depending on local economic opportunities, to guard against over-borrowing. Wall Street needs similar safeguards.
Sara Rimer of The Times wrote an article last week that gave us a startling glimpse of just how mindless and self-destructive the U.S. is becoming.
“The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.”
.. an article in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books (with co-author Everett Ehrlich) lamenting the sad state of the U.S. infrastructure. Most Americans are oblivious on this issue. We’re like a family that won’t even think about fixing a sagging, leaky roof until it collapses on our heads.
Department stores hire mystery shoppers. Restaurant chains bring in undercover diners to rate their food and service. Churches enlist Thomas Harrison, a former pastor from Tulsa, Okla., and a professional mystery worshipper.
Mr. Harrison -- a meticulous inspector who often uses the phrase "I was horrified" to register his disapproval of dust bunnies and rude congregants -- poses as a first-time churchgoer and covertly evaluates everything from the cleanliness of the bathrooms to the strength of the sermon.
For anyone who has ever worried about the power of a vicious rumor, Barack Obama's strategy over the summer must have seemed almost bizarre. Buffeted by rumors about his religion, his upbringing, and controversial statements made by his wife, Obama launched Fight the Smears, a website that lists every well-traveled false rumor about the candidate, alongside rebuttals and explanations for how the rumors arose.
Fighting rumors by publicizing them in vivid, high-profile locations is, to say the least, a surprising tactic. It's hard to imagine someone victimized by workplace rumors summarizing them and posting them on the lunchroom wall. The conventional wisdom about rumors is to take the high road and not respond. When John McCain, during the 2000 Republican primaries, was plagued with rumors that he had fathered an illegitimate child, for the most part he opted not to engage with them at all. Why would anyone want to broadcast negative claims about themselves?
And yet new research into the science of rumors suggests Obama's approach may be a sounder strategy - and the reasons why it makes sense suggest that we misunderstand both how rumors work and why they exist.
Everyone needs a laugh right now. And the Daily Mash has surpassed itself as the first port of comedic call in this time of doom and gloom. They've written spoofs aplenty but their best line remains this explanation of the bailout:
The government is to invest £500bn of your money in British banks so they can lend it back to you with interest.
During Tuesday night's presidential debate, Sen. Barack Obama was talking about health care, and most of 25 undecided voters in Columbus, Ohio, liked what they heard. They turned knobs on small, wireless dials in their hands -- and a graph representing their immediate reaction was aired live to about 9.2 million people watching CNN.
.. But live feedback graphics may have another effect. Recent psychological experiments suggest they can influence viewers' judgments. That might give tiny focus groups outsize influence, especially over undecideds. But there is a broader question: How much of our political opinions are our own?
But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
..Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.
The credit crisis is forcing investors to ask, "Which banks are safe?" According to a survey from the World Economic Forum, Canada has the world's most solid banking system. Next on the list are Sweden, Luxembourg and Australia. The U.S. ranked 40th, behind Germany, Chile and Namibia. Britain, which used to be ranked in the top five, dropped to 44th place.
