NetNewsWire 3.0Is available now. Two obvious, to me, things that I use that have disappeared, both toolbar buttons: 1) refresh current feed; 2) open in default browser. Oh well. The rest looks pretty good.
Dismal WorldA powerful collection of photographs, as they say ‘unforgettable’
Is this the world's most polluted river?Daily Mail — More unforgettable photographs.
A technique for producing ideas
It presents a very simple and sensible strategy for producing ideas. Nothing really revolutionary, but he makes it very clear and reproducible.
A basic concept is that new ideas come from combinations of old elements. So, you need a lot of raw material, you need to work on putting it together, and you need to give the ideas space to appear in. The technique consists of roughly these 5 steps:
Ming the Mechanic — Somebody told me about these when I was a kid, one of my parents maybe? a teacher? I don’t remember. I have incorporated a lot of this into my regular work routine. Number 3 is something that my colleagues have found especially annoying I think.
UN envoy: anti-Hamas rhetoric undermines democracy
Alvaro de Soto, the just-retired UN coordinator for the Middle East, has warned that international hostility to the Palestinian Hamas movement, now fighting in the bitterly escalating civil conflict in Gaza, could have grave consequences by persuading millions of Muslims that democratic methods do not work.
Guardian Unlimited — I hope somebody listens to this guy. Probably not.
Internet Explorer: See how a web site looks in IE without a PC
Webs site NetRenderer previews how a web page design will display on Internet Explorer 7, IE6, and IE5. Just enter your URL and NetRenderer automatically loads your web site in Internet Explorer, takes a screenshot, and then displays the screenshot in your browser. NetRenderer is perfect for testing web sites on IE when you’re on a Mac or Linux and can’t (or don’t want to) get your hands on IE.
Lifehacker — The fewer reasons for me to have windows around the better.
Comment is Free - But Not That Free (Updated)
I wondered how the Guardian would react to my criticism of their editorial staff on comment is free. What they appear to have done is leave the article up, but remove links to it from the front page and the Comment is Free page. So there is no way 99.9% 0f readers will know it is there.
Craig Murray — That the story…
Comment is free: Reid's new best friends
The Lib Dems should be ashamed of themselves - trading support of John Reid’s illiberal anti-terror measures for short-term political advantage.
… and this is the hidden article.
Just for fun, click on it. Maybe someone will take the hint.
You may have heard of the lambda calculus, in which everything is a function. And you may have asked yourself, as I have, ok that’s great, but I how do I do anything with just functions? How do I create all those datastructures I’ve become acustommed to? Do I need to build the datastructures I’ve become accustomed to? If so, how do I do it?
Meta-Meta — No, no, no… not that kind of church… the other kind.
More Information Confirms What You Already Know
However, the Yale Cultural Cognition researchers made another more disheartening discovery. In their poll they gave a subset of 350 respondents additional facts - about two paragraphs – about nanotechnology to see if more information would shift public risk perceptions. They found that it did. In this case, the more information people had, the more they retreated to their initial positions. … “One might suppose that as members of the public learn more about nanotechnology their assessments of its risk and benefits should converge. Our results suggest that exactly the opposite is likely to happen,” note the researchers. What seems to be happening is that individuals use information to affirm their pre-existing cultural identities rather than evaluate risks in purely instrumental terms.
Reason Magazine — A very interesting article, and a little depressing
AIDA/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server
AIDA/Web is a web server and framework for complex web applications with integrated Ajax support, rich collection of web components to build web pages programatically, MVC-like separation of presentation from domain, nice looking and bookmarkable url links, with integrated session and security management and many more.
Another web framework in smalltalk
The BBComposer a FIrefox add n allows you to edit textarea contents by switching in a WYSIWYG mode with a right click on it. You can choose 4 content types : XHTML, BBCode, XBBCode and Wiki. Especially useful for CMS, Wiki and Forums. Returns valid and semantic…
This is interesting.
Ottawa not ready to ask for release of Khadr
Ottawa has not yet requested that Omar Khadr, the only Canadian being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be released to Canadian custody despite a judge’s decision last week to drop all charges against him.
Once again, I find myself embarrassed by the Canadian Government.
MEASURES THAT MATTER AND THE MISGUIDED 'PRODUCTIVITY' SCORECARD
A new report by the Conference Board of Canada laments the country’s lagging productivity, measured by factors such as business and technology literacy, innovation and investment in R&D. To this extent they have a point. However, their prescription for improving the situation is mostly the same tired, discredited and decidedly un-innovative ‘globalization’ techniques
Dave Pollard, How to Save the World — Read this article, especially if you are Canadian. I almost had a stroke when listening to an interview of Anne Golden, president of the Conference Board of Canada – I cannot believe CBC let her off so easily. And my son was in the car with me and he thought I was mad at him.
the behavior of markets where sellers have detailed information about the products, particularly the quality of the products, that buyers do not have.
Richard Tibbetts, Nothing to See Here — An interesting article with links to more interesting articles. Something to think about.
Learning Object Repositories 2.0
I (still) spend a fair amount of time thinking about the learning object repositories work that was done back at the turn of the century. A bunch of folks (myself included) took up the task of building software to let people easily publish, describe, share, find (and hopefully use) digital assets or learning objects (assets with a bunch of metadata tacked on the side).
I think it’s fair to say that the experiments failed pretty dramatically.
D'Arcy Norman dot net — This learning object repository 1.0 stuff caused all sorts of problems for my company. It kind of reminds me of the lemon markets in the article noted above – only this time neither buyer nor seller knew what was going on.
Holden Efijy Concept CarTechEBlog — This is a nice looking car. A little out of my price range… ‘7 figures’. Right.
Why The Poor Are Crazy To Save Money
While one would think the government would want to encourage the poor to save, under the current system, low-income households must pay astronomical penalties if they decide to save money, according to the report by the National Center for Policy Analysis. For example, each dollar a single mother earning $15,000 a year saves ends up costing her $2.60 in higher taxes and lost government benefits for an effective marginal tax on savings of 260%. Save a dollar, lose $2.60 in higher taxes and benefits.
How is this possible?
SavingAdvice.com Blog — Pretty easily it seems.
