aka Variola Virus (more)

Andrew Hacker asks whether we should teach Algebra. (more)

Mr. IgonValue http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Igon_Value_Problem (more)

Genius.com laid off a third of its staff, with the bulk of the cuts coming from the engineering department (more)

The universe of WebLog sites which link to each other. aka Blogosphere. (more)

Not having been a Dungeons And Dragons type, reading Geektastic was the first time I recall running across the Alignment Model of Moral/Ethical behavior. Early editions of Dungeons & Dragons allowed players to choose between three alignments when creating a character: lawful, implying honor and respect for society's rules; chaotic, implying the opposite; and neutral, meaning neither. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons introduced a second axis of good, neutral and evil, offering a combination of nine alignments. There are a couple variants of Neutral/Neutral: Neutral alignment, also referred to as True Neutral or Neutral Neutral, is called the "Undecided" or "Nature's" alignment. This alignment represents Neutral on both axes, and tends not to feel strongly towards any alignment... Some Neutral characters, rather than feeling undecided, are committed to a balance between the alignments. They may see good, evil, law and chaos as simply prejudices and dangerous extremes. One test finds me Chaotic Neutral, today... (more)

Anonymous is a loosely associated international network of activist and hacktivist entities. A website nominally associated with the group describes it as "an Internet gathering" with "a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives".[2] The group became known for a series of well-publicized publicity stunts and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government, religious, and corporate websites.[3] Anonymous originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)

Last week, Aaron Barr, a top executive at computer security firm H B Gary Federal, boasted to the Financial Times that his firm had infiltrated and begun to expose Anonymous, the group of pro-WikiLeaks hackers that had launched cyber attacks on companies terminating services to the whistleblowing site (such as PayPal, Master Card, Visa, Amazon and others). In retaliation, Anonymous hacked into the email accounts of HB Gary, published 50,000 of their emails online, and also hacked Barr's Twitter and other online accounts. Among the emails that were published was a report prepared by HB Gary -- in conjunction with several other top online security firms, including PalantirTechnologies -- on how to destroy WikiLeaks. The emails indicated the report was part of a proposal to be submitted to Bank Of America through its outside law firm, Hunton & Williams... It turns out that the firms involved here are large, legitimate and serious, and do substantial amounts of work for both the U.S. Government and the nation's largest private corporations (as but one example, see this email from a Stanford computer science student about Palantir). Moreover, these kinds of smear campaigns are far from unusual; in other leaked HB Gary emails, ThinkProgress discovered that similar proposals were prepared for the Chamber Of Commerce to attack progressive groups and other activists (including ThinkProgress). And perhaps most disturbing of all, Hunton & Williams was recommended to Bank of America's General Counsel by the Justice Department -- meaning the U.S. Government is aiding Bank of America in its defense against/attacks on WikiLeaks. (more)

CW-1 was "Sabu," a top Anonymous/Lulz Sec Cracker who was in real life an unemployed 28-year old living in New York City public housing. His sixth-floor apartment had been visited by the FBI in June 2011, and Sabu had been arrested and "turned." For months, he had been an FBI Informant, watched 24 hours a day by an agent and using a government issued laptop that logged everything he did. (more)

4chan is an English-language ImageBoard website. Users generally post anonymously, with the most recent posts appearing above the rest. 4chan is split into various boards with their own specific content and guidelines. Registration is not required, nor is it possible (except for staff). Launched on October 1, 2003, its boards were originally used for posting pictures and discussing manga and anime, as the site was modeled on Japanese imageboards, particularly 2chan. The site quickly became popular and expanded, though much of 4chan's content still features otaku, anime, and other Japanese cultural influences. The site has been linked to Internet subcultures and activism, most notably Anonymous, the Alt-Right and Project Chanology.[3][4][5] 4chan users have been responsible for the formation or popularization of Internet memes such as Lolcats, RickRolling, "Chocolate Rain", Pedobear and many others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan

A couple weeks ago Diaspora's founders announced their new project MakR, which they're developing under Y-Combinator. The site is quite simple — basically, users can overlay captions in various fonts onto photos. Then other users can take them apart, modify and repost them. It has a lot in common with 4chan founder Christopher Poole’s company Canvas. (more)

Collaborative Writing app, (more)

aka Google Office (more)

Jon Udell on Teaching Students to Marshal Evidence and Evaluate Claims (more)

Thomas De Zengotita on "Common ground: finding our way back to the Enlightenment" (from Jan'03). It isn't right to assume that anyone who isn't engaged is somehow impaired, corrupted by Propaganda, distracted by sports and sitcoms. That bread-and-circuses stuff just doesn't cut it anymore. Noam Chomsky's 9/11 book got better shelf position at Barnes And Noble than Dr Phil, and basic information about the rape of the planet has been endlessly disseminated. No, let's face it. People aren't interested. They don't care. That's the truth. It's also important to notice that Political Engagement is not a function of education... (more)

model of conditional probabilities of Thomas Bayes (more)

text classification algorithm (more)

the perception of being safe? (more)

The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. A variety of authors have argued that a particular system is the "end of history" including Thomas More in Utopia, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Vladimir Solovyov, Alexandre Kojève[1] and Francis Fukuyama in the 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history (more)

author The End Of History and the Last Man ISBN:0380720027 (more)