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‘Big Data’ Means Business Needs Mathematicians – Technology Review
The proliferation of ways to measure things — point of service terminals, web analytics, geographic and temporal records, even semantic information — means businesses are drowning in data. This has led to a new class of engineer, the “data scientist,” whose job it is to perform the sophisticated mathematical gymnastics required to extract actionable information from this mass of numbers. According to mathematician Cathy O’Neill, the skills of a data scientist include not only crunching numbers, but also visualizing the results.
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US citizen charged over ‘Pentagon bomb plot’ – Americas – Al Jazeera English
Man arrested in Massachusetts ahead of alleged planned attacks using model aircraft to bomb Pentagon and US Capitol.
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World Community Grid’s mission is to create the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity.
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This tree has a USB port.
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Weekly Women’s History Image: Martyr to the Protestants
After Edward VI, son of Henry VIII, died, the next heirs according to Henry VIII’s will were supposed to be Henry’s daughters, Mary then Elizabeth. But both had been declared illegitimate during their lifetimes, as Henry managed his marriages to try to get male heirs. Protestants feared what might happen if Mary, a Catholic, gained the throne. An advisor talked Edward VI into bypassing his sisters for a cousin, Lady Jane Grey …
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Wangari Maathai 1940 – 2011 | About.com Women’s History
[Quotes from Maathai; list of female nobel laureates]
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First Woman in the U.S. Senate | About.com Women’s History
At age 87, Rebecca Ann Felton became the first woman to take a seat in the US Senate. But her appointment was only symbolic, and she only served for two days.
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Would Women Be Included? | About.com Women’s History
When women like Abigail Adams found themselves playing very active roles in managing businesses, farms, and other financial matters, while their husbands were away at war or creating the new American government, they began to ask whether women were going to be included in the new “rights of man.” …
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Why Progressives Don’t Support Ron Paul | Alas, a blog • by Ampersand
Friedersdorf is right to think that President Paul would be better than Obama on many crucial civil liberties issues. But Friedersdorf makes it sound as if Obama is unquestionably worse than Paul on every plausible civil liberty issue. That’s simply not true. It’s wrong to evaluate Paul on civil liberties without mentioning his opposition to the drug war, but it’s just as wrong to evaluate Paul on civil liberties without mentioning his opposition to women’s right to abortion.
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The Success Industry | No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? * by noahbrand
We can, at this point, take it as well-established that men are too often considered “success objects” by society, yes? I don’t need to once again explain how, just as women are judged by their perceived adherence to a largely arbitrary standard of sexual attractiveness, men are judged by their material and financial “success”? Good.
Now, being “successful” financially has never been easy, and has only gotten harder in recent decades. Thing is, the narrative that anyone can get rich is built very deeply into American culture. …If anyone can get rich, this assumption runs, then everyone can get rich, and therefore any person who’s not rich has, in some way, failed.
…Just as the women-as-sex-objects narrative has created the fucked-up mess that is the beauty industry, so has the men-as-success-objects routine gotten together with the rigged game of the American economy to create the success industry. And hot damn, are they both ineffably awful.
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Answer: It is getting ever more expensive and skimpier and skimpier. …Health care has not become more expensive simply because everything is getting more expensive; it has been the engine that pulls up the general cost of living.
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The other big jobs fight – The Plum Line – The Washington Post
…another jobs fight you really should be keeping an eye on: The battle over the measure to punish China for currency manipulation.
It’s a really interesting story, and it’s going to heat up in a big way next week. A lot is riding on the outcome …
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Doing it their way | The Plum Line • by Greg Sargent
Paul Krugman asks an interesting question: “Where’s my Boehner boom?”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. And now the hand-coded portion of this entry:
SIOCIONICS:
[I am highly skeptical of ALL personality typing systems, but this shit is gold from a fiction writer's perspective. -L]
* Socionics in the West
* Sionika
* Socionist Blog
* Socionics.com – The New Psychology
EVERYTHING ELSE:
* A Surprising Town Is Now America’s Top Bike City | Environment | AlterNet
Minneapolis also launched the first large-scale bikesharing sytem in U.S. — called Nice Ride — and boasts arguably the nation’s finest network of off-street bicycle trails. It was chosen as one of four pilot projects (along with Marin County, California; Columbia, Missouri; and Sheboygan County, Wisconsin) for the federal Non-Motorized Transportation Program, which aims to shift a share of commuters out of cars and onto bikes or foot.
* O.C. 4th in U.S. job growth – Handling Hard Times : The Orange County Register (California)
Orange County’s appearance on the top 10 best job growth list was a major turnaround. In the first quarter of 2010, the county made a different list — fourth worst job loss in the country.
* Appeals Court Delays Release of Proposition 8 Trial Tapes – News – ABA Journal
A federal appeals court has delayed the release of video recordings of last year’s trial on the constitutionality of Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage.
* Facebook Tracking Probe Sought by Washington Privacy Groups – Businessweek
Ten public-interest groups asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook Inc.’s tracking of Internet users after they log off the world’s most popular social-networking service.
* A Punch In The Face: The Hidden Police Brutality At Occupy Wall Street
We have heard over and over again that the policeman who pepper sprayed Occupy Wall Street protesters over the weekend was an isolated incident, but here is video of protester being punched in the face by NYPD….
Any American who relies only upon television to get their news may be only just now becoming aware of the fact that there is a protest going on. (In a week or two, maybe the MSM will get around to telling them that the protests have spread to places like Chicago and Los Angeles, and it is getting bigger every day).
* 100 Best Bookmarklets for Writers, Researchers, and Students | MatchACollege.com
* Galaxy Clusters Back Up Einstein’s Theory of Relativity | Wired Science | Wired.com
Testing gravity is simple: walk out of a second-floor window and see what happens. It’s a lot tougher to test Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity — the general theory of relativity — which says that the gravity of an object warps space and time around it. Although researchers have proved general relativity on the scale of the solar system, validating it on cosmic scales has been more challenging. That’s exactly what a group of astrophysicists in Denmark have now done.
* LibGuides Community Site
Know what libarians know – find it in LibGuides!
The LibGuides Community Site aggregates all public content from institutions using LibGuides, CampusGuides, and CommunityGuides.
It is a useful resource for anybody interested in learning new things or doing library research. The system harvests the knowledge from librarians at thousands of institutions worldwide.
* Frustration With Elite Failure Boils Over Into Culture of Protest | FDL News Desk
If nothing else, the #occupywallstreet protests, happening in the heart of the world’s financial center, have forced elites to reckon with their own precarious position. The New York Times does the honors today, connecting the protests to other uprisings around the globe, and making a subtle (and also wrong) point that there’s something anti-democratic about popular protest.
* Happy Hour Roundup – The Plum Line – The Washington Post
Matt Yglesias is absolutely right: It should be seen as a failure of the Fed when it misses its inflation target on the downside. Especially when unemployment is where it is. By law, the Federal Reserve is responsible for both price stability and full employment. It remains entirely inexplicable why Barack Obama hasn’t made it a priority to fill the Fed Board with people who want to promote economic growth.
* Justice Department Asks Supreme Court to Hear Affordable Care Act Case | FDL Action
…is likely that the Supreme Court will take up the case soon and offer its ruling in June of 2012. The fate of the individual mandate and “Obamacare” will now rest in the hands of the nine Supreme Court Justices.
David Dayen has more reactions here.
* The Daily Caller reveals the larger truths – The Plum Line – The Washington Post
…the Daily Caller took a terrible hit yesterday after falsely reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency is looking to hire 230,000 new “bureaucrats” — at a cost of $21 billion! — to implement new climate rules. The tale quickly went viral on the right as the latest example of Obama overreach and government run amok, and the fact that the tale was comically absurd on its face didn’t seem to slow the frenzy.
But now the Daily Caller is doubling down on the story, and the argument it’s making in its own defense is really something to behold.
To back up: As Kate Sheppard noted yesterday in her post debunking the original Daily Caller story, there are only 17,000 employees at the EPA, which alone makes the Daily Caller’s claim ridiculous. Not only that, but the legal brief that formed the basis for the Daily Caller story was actually pointing to the 230,000 new employees as a theoretical outcome to be avoided. …
* Go Further Obama: 67% Want Taxes Raised On Those Making Over $250,000
According a new Pew poll 67% of the American people want more than Obama’s Buffett Rule, they want taxes raised on everyone making over $250,000.
When the Pew Center for People and The Press gave respondents a list of options for dealing with the budget deficit the most popular option was raising taxes on those who make $250,000 or more. Over 2/3 of respondents (67%) supported a tax hike. Only 30% (there’s your base GOP) disapproved of raising taxes on the wealthy. Democrats (82%) and Independents (67%) supported raising taxes. The real surprise is that Republicans were split on the idea, (47%-51%).
The second most popular option was also something that Republicans are opposed to, cutting the military. By a margin of 66%-29% those polled favored cutting the budget deficit by reducing America’s military commitment overseas. …
The Of interest (Sep 29-30) by Lee (via Diigo) , unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.