delegates infographic

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is an interactive infographic worth?

frontpage of nytimes at 2008-4-22 20:10 ET

(and it would be so much cooler if it didn't use Flash)

AppEngine - Web Hypercard, finally

Especially as a Django fan, I'm excited about this, even if it is Google. And I certainly hope something as cool as Hypercard on the web-as-platform might not be far behind.

AppEngine - Web Hypercard, finally (Skrentablog)
Google's AppEngine is being compared to Amazon's EC2/S3. But Google deserves credit here for coming up with a pretty differently-positioned product. There may be overlap for many users of course, but it's really operating at a whole different level of the stack.

Depopulation of eastern Germany

SOMETHING odd is happening to the cities of eastern Germany. Plattenbauten, the soulless prefabricated apartment blocks thrown up by the region's former communist rulers, are being knocked down. Occasionally one will be truncated, shorn of its upper storeys. Older streets are gap-toothed where wreckers have removed abandoned houses. Cityscapes are being pruned, removing dead and dying edifices in the hope of saving the rest.

More: Depopulation of eastern Germany | Tearing itself down | Economist.com

links: US, university, technology, behavioral economics

United States

• 1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says (NYT): "For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report."
• Gun Crazy (NYT): "Atrocities like [the school massacres] make Americans feel angry and perhaps helpless."
• Rich man, poor man: The life expectancy gap EPI report showing (for Social Security-covered males) that "the increase in longevity for older participants occurred mostly among those in the top half of the earnings distribution."

University

• Online Video Lectures and Transcripts - European Graduate School EGS Videos of EGS' lectures at Saas-Fee. Also here: YouTube - egsvideo's Channel
• Fulfilling the Promise of Open Content :: Inside Higher Ed: Open content already! I'm not sure we should boycott closed access journals (Danah Boyd), but I'm for anything that speeds the process of making content open and available. I'll do my part by alerting anyone who isn't aware of arXiv.org already to it. If physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and biologists can do it, why can't the social and human sciences?
• 24C3 - Programming DNA - #2329: Great presentation by Drew Endy at the C3.

[Read more →]

links: Rist, books, etc.

Pipilotti Rist

• SFMOMA | Making Sense of Modern Art: Pipilotti Rist: The guide, by Rist herself, is wonderful. I remember the exhibit well.
• Pipilotti Rist Videos
  
• ZKM: fast forward - Media: More commentary (in German)
• U B U W E B: Pipilotti Rist: Most of her videos.

Books

• The Internet Speculative Fiction Database: Interesting quantitative literary studies project.
• Steven Levy - Book Ripper Doesn't Bother Publishers -- Yet (washpost): "Could the publishing industry get Napsterized? ..."

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Playing With Trains

(via sivacracy.net)

links: week 4, podcast recommendations

A few days a friend asked me for my favorite radio shows and got me thinking about my current radio consumption. When I was growing up, I listened to my the NPR station in Boston for hours every day, yet I rarely listen to FM radio anymore. My "radio" listening these days is almost entirely confined to what I can get as a podcast. They're just more convenient. Who wants to be tethered to a radio? And my dissatisfaction with the program schedule of the local NPR-affiliate here in Durham hasn't helped either. For example, they've given the wonderful On The Media (WNYC) a 6:00 AM time slot on Saturday. While it would be nice if the station could find some middle ground between Northeastern and North Carolinian radio preferences, I'm pretty happy with my podcast diet these days. Here's a sample:

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links: week 3

putnam-rorty video via 3quarksdaily
Little video about the Putnam-Rorty debate and the revival of American pragmatism.

Inside Higher Ed :: Call to Arms for Academic Labor
Review of Marc Bosquet's How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (book website)

Technology Review: "You Don't Understand Our Audience"
Wonderful commentary by former NBC producer on what's wrong with the media in the USA.

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links: first week of 2008

Convinced that I ought to have something to show for all the time I spent online last month, I thought I might try out posting a few links.

Economics

• Brad DeLong's Political Economy and American Economic History lectures at UC Berkeley are online and made good mp3 player fodder for me. DeLong's a free trade neoliberal but says a bunch of sensible stuff, I thought. Here's a link to the directory containing the lectures for those uninterested in wading through the blog posts for links to the lectures. I found his gloss on Reich's Supercapitalism helpful. I also found it helpful to increase the tempo of the lectures 50% with Audacity. An hour is a long time.
• Decent comprehensive paper on the data on growing economic inequality in the US and UK from the latest issue of the Post-Autistic Economics Review.
• Gapminder's "GapCasts" are super. The newest installment compares France and Turkey.

Duke

• Some kind soul in Canada recorded Fredric Jameson's remarks at the opening Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. The lecture's titled "Future of Culture, Future of Utopia" (mp3).

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Library hacking at Duke

I've signed up to do biweekly(ish) posts at Duke's Library Hacks blog. My first post, a review of the Firefox extension Zotero, should be up shortly...