aka Taylorism, after F W Taylor? (more)

believer in Monotheism

In Jan'2009 Nathan Lewis discussed buying Gold bars via Com Ex and taking delivery to an independent depository. And: For quantities of less than 100oz., I would start to look at 1oz. coins like Krugerrands or Eagles. These have had a rather nasty premium to Comex gold recently -- as high as 30%. However, the premiums have come down a bit. I think that individuals who own hundreds of coins are selling them for a premium and acquiring Comex bars at lower prices. If you can find coins with a premium of 10% or less, I'd look into it. 5% is not bad. The premiums for Krugerrands used to be about 1%, if you are wondering. Keep coins somewhere safe and secret -- NOT a bank safe deposit box... I still think that Bullionvault (bullionvault.com) and Goldmoney (goldmoney.com) are superior to any form of paper gold, including ETFs, futures, Perth mint certificates, etc. etc. They are relatively cheap, liquid, and have lower transaction costs. However, there is something to be said for owning real metal directly. (more)

aka Marketing via Personalization (more)

Gary Hamel is the originator (with C K Prahalad) of the concept of core competencies... His academic standing took a dent soon after publication of the hardback version of Leading The Revolution, in which he had written a very positive profile of Enron. Following the strong reception of Leading the Revolution, Hamel began work on Resilience in Business Strategy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Hamel

The Ben Nano Note is an interesting piece of Open Source Hardware. It includes a full QWERTY keyboard, USB Host, a MicroSD card slot supporting SDIO, serial console connection inside the battery compartment, and uses a kernel, bootloader and root file system that can be flashed over the USB port... There is no built-in networking, but the micro-SD storage card slot supports several SDIO WiFi cards, and USB-to-Ethernet adapters have been tested to work with the USB port... The software is based on the OpenWRT Linux distribution popular on many consumer WiFi routers. Has Python too! (more)

Python Gui Framework. Wrapper for WxWindows. (more)

Profile of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Garbage, Pollution). Plastic gets into the ocean when people throw it from ships or leave it in the path of an incoming tide, but also when rivers carry it there, or when sewage systems and storm drains overflow. (more)

EckhardHöffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion -- unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge (Intelligence Increase) in the 19th century... Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900. Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development -- in his view, it was none other than Copy Right law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom. Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time... The market for scientific literature didn't collapse even as copyright law gradually became established in Germany in the 1840s. German publishers did, however, react to the new situation in a restrictive way reminiscent of their British colleagues, cranking up prices and doing away with the low-price market.

The city of Leon, Mexico, is installed real-time eye scanners that can identity 50 people per minute in motion, without any participation on their part. These can be set up in public places to identify anyone whose retinal prints are on file. So much for Privacy - calling Little Brother!

The RIAA and FM broadcasters couldn't come to a deal on broadcasters paying for the music they play (currently, only songwriters get paid, not artists or labels... Satellite Radio and webcasters (Internet Radio) currently pay full performance fees to labels or artists, but Radio does not, thanks to a longstanding exemption in copyright law.). (more)

Tom Evslin on the set of grants that Vermont has pieced together to build their Wireless Open World network. *Specifically, V Tel *(Vermont Telephone Company, which is private and independent) is providing three things with the money: fiber to the home (FTTH) in their "traditional" service area around Springfield, Vermont; WireLess Internet (LTE) access reaching virtually all of the estimated 15% of Vermont residences which can't get good Broad Band today as well as many small businesses; and neighbor-to-neighbor training to "show how broadband can help find jobs, improve schools, start businesses, access federal and state assistance, and enhance rural life." OpenNet? (more)

I think I agree with Mark Dery about Lady Gaga. Is she a rarified being who has more talent in her clitoral hood than you can even dream of, little man? Whose Art for Art’s Sake raptures us out of our stonewashed lives, into a disco ball-flecked Bubble World, a Studio 54 in the Sky where gay teens, scenery-chewing emo boys, and high-school weirdos are waved into the VIP lounge while all the Mean Girls and haters mill outside, crazed with envy? Or is she just some Tisch drop-out who watched Grease one too many times, pickled her brain in Britney, and now thinks she’s some cross between Madonna and Leigh Bowery, just because she forgets to wear pants and name-checks The Night Porter (Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” for people who don’t read)?... Reading a Deeply Silly commentary on the “Telephone” video by “Gaga blogger and doctoral student MeghanVicks,” who wheels out the obligatory reference to Foucault’s Discipline And Punish to Explain It All For Us, I’m reminded of a lazy afternoon in L.A., sometime in the ’80s, listening to a masseuse to the stars telling me she’d seen Madonna carrying a copy of Foucault’s book in her purse to certify her scandalousness. Apparently, my friend chuckled, the poor dear was under the impression—never having read the damned thing—that it was a bondage manual.

Content Farm

Interview with Timothy Taylor, author of The Artificial Ape. Clearly our big brains did evolve, but I think Charles Darwin had the wrong mechanism. I believe it was technology. We were never fully biological entities. We are and always have been artificial apes. The archaeological record shows chipped stone tool technologies earlier than 2.5 million years ago. That's the smoking gun. The oldest fossil specimen of the genus Homo is at most 2.2 million years old. That's a gap of more than 300,000 years - more than the total length of time that Homo sapiens has been on the planet. This suggests that earlier hominins called australopithecines were responsible for the stone tools. Evolution.

Cyber Culture author (more)

Scott Rosenberg examines the crapping writing that gets Associated Content to the top of Google News results. But when Google tells me that this drivel is the most relevant result, I can't help thinking, the game's up. The Wagner tubas are tuning up for Googledammerung: It's the twilight of the bots. Some great links in there, too: (more)

PolyMaps is a free JavaScript library for making dynamic, interactive maps in modern web browsers. Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom (Zooming) datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from Open Street Map, Cloud Made, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps. Because Polymaps can load data at a full range of scales, it’s ideal for showing information from country level on down to states, cities, neighborhoods, and individual streets. Because Polymaps uses SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) to display information, you can use familiar, comfortable CSS rules to define the design of your data. And because Polymaps uses the well known spherical mercator tile format for its imagery and its data, publishing information is a snap.

site that focuses new content creation on high-traffic/hot search terms, etc. (more)

Oracle is suing Google, claiming that Android infringes on Java Patent-s that Oracle got when it acquired Sun Microsystems. How much might it matter? (more)