December 2007
52 posts
New Subway Math May Bring Windfall of Spare Change... →
Under the new plan, the minimum that riders must spend to qualify for a bonus will be reduced to $7, from $10, in an effort to put a fare discount within the reach of more people with lower incomes. But in that case, when someone puts $7 on a card, an additional $1.05 will appear on the card, for a total of $8.05. If they take four subway trips, at $2 each, that will leave a balance on the card of...
Google’s Norvig Is Down On Natural Language Search →
We think what’s important about natural language is the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for… . To give some examples, “New York” is different from “York,” but “Vegas” is the same as “Las Vegas,” and “Jersey” may or may not be the same as “New Jersey.” That’s a natural-language aspect that we’re focusing on. Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we’re...
A Social Order Shaped by Technology and Traffic -... →
in Silicon Valley, you locate a company where the engineers are,” he said. “You would never locate a networking company in Palo Alto. Silicon Valley, the wellspring of the digital technologies fueling globalization, is itself a collection of remarkably local clusters based on industry niches, skills, school ties, traffic patterns, ethnic groups and even weekend sports teams.
Alltel Feature Turns Voicemail to Text - New York... →
mayhaps a little pricey? Alltel Corp. is unveiling a new feature that uses voice-recognition software to allow wireless phone customers to read their voicemail messages as text messages. Fees for the service start at $4.99 for 20 voicemail conversions a month and go up to $19.99 monthly for 100 conversions.
Revolution Money Thinks It Can Win Friends On... →
Path Intelligence Monitors Foot Traffic in Retail... →
Path Intelligence is a U.K. based company that monitors foot traffic in a rather ingenious way, through customersâ cell phones. Path Intelligence has built receivers that detect cells signals and triangulate the ownerâs location with accuracy of up to
On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data - New York... →
S. Shyam Sundar, a professor and founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, has led students in several Facebook studies exploring identity. One involved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or...
Revolution Money Thinks It Can Win Friends On... →
Steve Case wants to make some new friends on Facebook. Today, his startup Revolution Money launched a friend-to-friend payment application on Facebook called MoneyExchange (as of this writing, it is still waiting to be added to the Facebook Application directory, but click on the link above and it should take you there if you are a Facebook member). Just like PayPal, which already has an app on...
Political Dashboard - 2008 Presidential Election... →
YouTube Attack Ad Dogs Huckabee Campaign →
A new attack ad accusing Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee of freeing a rapist who then committed murder resembles any of the professionally produced negative TV spots shot by political ad agencies for decades. But the emotional 58-second video doesn’t advocate for any particular candidate, and it hasn’t aired as a paid advertisement on any television network. Instead, it...
Audio Spotlight - Put sound where you want it. →
Mounted above the billboard, the system projects an isolated beam of sound down onto a targeted area of the sidewalk - from seven stories up! People who pass by the billboard are startled and entertained by the sudden message, and their attention is drawn
Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft - New... →
Google maintains that pace courtesy of the cloud. With a vast majority of its products Web-based, it doesn’t wait to ship discs or load programs onto personal computers. Inside the company, late stages of product development are sometimes punctuated by 24-to-48-hour marathon programming sessions known as “hack-a-thons.” The company sometimes invites outside engineers to these sessions to encourage...
P2P Loans GainingTraction. Lending Club Goes... →
UK-based Zopa got the go-ahead from regulators to launch its U.S. Website last week. Zopa, which doesnât allow sub-prime loans at all, has a 0.1% default rate, whereas Prosper has a 3 percent default rate
Lives Are Growing Harder, Hispanics Say in Survey... →
the increase in high-profile immigration raids at workplaces and in immigrant communities over the past year has had a strong echo effect among Hispanics across the country. Two-thirds of Hispanic immigrants said they worried about the possibility of a deportation hurting their family. Strikingly, even among Latinos who are United States citizens and so run no risk of being deported, about...
Albany: Grant for Tracking Students - New York... →
The New York State Board of Regents announced on Thursday that it had been awarded more than $6 million in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wallace Foundation to improve the way it keeps track of graduation rates from high schools and colleges. A new system will track student progress through college. The system is intended to streamline the way school districts and state...
Meebo Brings Chat to Facebook Apps; Hits 20... →
Web-based instant messaging startup Meebo is now letting Facebook developers add chat to their apps through a new partner program
In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment -... →
taly’s low-tech way of life may enthrall tourists, but Internet use and commerce here are among the lowest in Europe, as are wages, foreign investment and growth. Pensions, public debt and the cost of government are among the highest.
Foundation Testing Potential of Philanthropy via... →
Proponents say the Internet has been useful in attracting people to sign petitions and attend rallies and demonstrations, if not in generating big donations.
google calendar sync →
Synchronize your BlackBerry calendar with your Google calendar. Want to get started right away? Just click the button and we’ll send a link to your phone.
Wuala, your files online →
The Postwar Election - New York Times →
money and organization matter less right now than getting in tune with the zeitgeist shift
Shibboleth - Doris Salcedo - Art - New York Times →
The Times of London reported that 15 people suffered minor injuries in the first eight weeks after “Shibboleth” opened in October in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern’s vast signature space.
Radars Taken Out by Arctic Warming - Dot Earth -... →
The Pentagon is closing down three of the 20 NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) early-warning radar sites in northern Alaska because the ground they’re built on in some cases is literally crumbling into the Arctic Ocean as a result of erosion caused by waves on ice-free waters
A Switch Is Flipped, and Justice Listens In - New... →
Nearly 20 years ago, the introduction of DNA testing transformed the investigation of crimes that involved human tissue — blood, semen, saliva, skin — by introducing a level of precision that human memory and witness could never provide. Now, digital technology has brought a second wave of transformation, offering new precision about what people did or said, regardless of whether they spilled...
Paying for Free Web Information - New York Times →
The crucial step for ACAP, everyone agrees, is to get the big search engines to play along. Despite the use of words like “comply” and “permissions,” ACAP would have no coercive power over the search engines. Yet right now, the search engines are holding back.
Slot Machines for the Young and Active - New York... →
Coming soon are slot machines with joysticks, which the industry expects to be particularly popular, and others that will allow users to play in tandem or against one another, much as they do in many Internet games. Industry surveys show that those 21 to 40 — people who came of age as dozens of states legalized casino gambling and cable television channels made celebrities of poker’s best players...
The Web Users’ Campaign - New York Times →
as we come to the end of a tumultuous political year, it seems clear that the candidates and their advisers absorbed the wrong lessons from Dean’s moment, or at least they failed to grasp an essential truth of it, which is that these things can’t really be orchestrated
Success without ads | CNET News.com →
For a decade, however, Consumer Reports has charged Internet readers the same price as print subscribers, currently $26 a year (or $5.99 for a month’s online access or $45 a year to get the magazine both in print and on the Web). While the rest of the industry sees print readers as more valuable—because advertisers do—Consumer Reports actually makes more money from readers on its Web...
MTA Home Page →
Don't Know Their Yahoo From Their YouTube -... →
The new economy still lacks a political infrastructure. The older industries are still the best organized, most entrenched and therefore most powerful. They can land the meetings with officials that lead to government loans; their armies of lobbyists can operate in the back rooms, slipping in tax breaks and increasing the competition for newcomers.
Developer's Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code →
At Port Authority, Getting a Charge, at No Charge... →
A free electrical outlet is manna for those in need of a charge, and many are finding that at the bus terminal in Manhattan.
Users, Web developers vent over IE7 →
he most pointed comment came from someone labeled only as dk. “You all continue to underestimate the dramatic spillover effect this poor developer experience has had and will continue to have on your other products and services. Let me drive this point home. I am a front-end programmer and a co-founder of a start-up. I can tell you categorically that my team won’t download and play...
Techdirt: Noncompete Agreements Are The DRM Of... →
“The networks of small companies so crucial to Silicon Valley’s growth would be less likely to develop in regions that enforce noncompetes.”
Tvinci Makes MTV Israel Rock So Much Harder Than... →
Tvinci →
mtv israel
Giant Global Graph | Decentralized Information... →
People running Internet systems had to let their computer be used for forwarding other people’s packets, and connecting new applications they had no control over. People making web sites sometimes tried to legally prevent others from linking into the site, as they wanted complete control of the user experience, and they would not link out as they did not want people to escape. Until after a...
Epicurious Has Added a Potential Privacy Violation... →
OOPS. -> A CA security researcher reports that the
site’s controversial Beacon online ad system, which transforms member transactions on affiliate sites into product/service endorsements, collects information about member actions on affiliate sites even if they’ve opted out of Beacon and logged off from Facebook.
PayPal Xilab Widgets →
Create your own online store with the PayPal storefront. Upload products, set prices, and start selling on your website or blog.
Statistics Pinpoint Problems in Paterson Schools -... →
Paterson is one of a half-dozen school districts around the country that have embraced this confrontational approach, known here as SchoolStat, in an effort to improve school performance and overhaul bureaucracies long seen as bloated, wasteful and unresponsive to the public.
Make It Right →
brad pitt commissions architecture in lower ninth. … same guy who dated the chick from friends?
Small Merchants Gain Large Presence on Web - New... →
Most online shoppers are so experienced that they feel safer venturing away from Amazon to buy from lesser-known sites, said Ray Boggs, an IDC analyst. Part of the reason, perhaps, is that the Web sites now built by many small merchants lack the amateurish feel of a few years ago.
Study finds immigrants' use of healthcare system... →
while other studies have attributed lower usage to immigrants simply being younger and healthier than the overall population, the study published Monday took into account age, health status, insurance status and poverty level. All such factors being equal, it found, immigrants still made fewer visits to physicians and were 30% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to have a regular source of...
Stealing Books For The Kindle Is Trivially Easy →
And while Apple sells lots of songs legally on iTunes, the vast majority of content on most iPods comes from home-ripped CDs or was obtained in violation of copyright laws. I expect the same thing with the Kindle. Users may buy a book or two on Kindle, but many users will simply steal the content they want to read. Thanks to Amazon, that’s really easy to do on their slick new device.
Authors, Scriptwriters, Coders: Get Ready to Spend... →
“Never mind how you get from point A to point B, we’re going there. Creative work won’t be directly paid for in the future. And we’re already in that future. Read my essays from the 90s to see how angry this made me. Now the anger has subsided, as a software writer, and it will subside for the Hollywood writers too. This may be the moment when the system breaks. It looks...
Detroit Digital - CTheory.net →
In a move that I will riff on throughout the remainder of this piece, Rice then suggests that Detroit, which he personifies as a halfway-house-derelict-in-reform, must stop searching for the lost narrative and lay on the couch of Deleuze and Guattari. In short, Detroit must learn to embrace its schizoid nature and step into the 21st century; Detroit must “see itself… as the embodiment...
Junk Charts: Live dynamic graphics →
Google: We don’t need a lot of spectrum — just the... →
If you enjoy watching the disruption of a tightly controlled industry, you’ll be in the cheering section. … “We believe it’s important to put our money where our principles are,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO. “Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today’s wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American...
THE WORLD IS GETTING SMARTER | More Intelligent... →
If each of a pair of tests was supposed to be equally closely related to innate intelligence, how could people have got so much better at one of them but not the other? It was this puzzling patchiness that started Flynn thinking along the right lines. He likes to use sporting analogies to illustrate his ideas. Suppose we had long been in the habit of subjecting children to a battery of tests for...
The Evolution of Facebooks Beacon - Bits -... →
three versions of Beacon’s user notifications that have run since the program was announced Nov. 6