![brooklynmutt:
“The best New York Times typo [mistake] EVER.” - @BorowitzReport](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4p4yuzkDx1qz80pso1_400.jpg)
“The best New York Times typo [mistake] EVER.” - @BorowitzReport
Alison Fairbrother: A Fish Story -
How an angler and two government bureaucrats may have saved the Atlantic Ocean.
The Washington Monthly || May/June 2012
“When I look at Kickstarter, I see small businesses that have been funded by their customers. I see the acceleration of this shift away from the industrial manufacturing ideology to more of a maker economy. And I also see an idea so powerful that the company name has become a verb.” —
@om
Kickstarted: my conversation with Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen — Tech News and Analysis
(via fred-wilson)
(via fred-wilson)
Microsoft’s Grasp of Language
Words taken directly from the Visual Studio 11 Beta site.
Via Matt Gemmell.
Select to embiggen.
Obama orders federal agencies to go mobile -
President Obama on Wednesday issued an executive order requiring government agencies to make services available via mobile phones.
Under the new order, each federal agency will be required to make two “key government services” available on mobile devices within the next 12 months.
The order comes as the administration ramps up efforts to make large amounts of government data more accessible to the public to increase transparency.
Google MapsGL - The shadows cast by the buildings are relative to the current position of the sun.
/via Chaotic
Like a large swath of the Internet, I have become increasingly obsessed with the nonsensical tweets of the @horse_ebooks spambot twitter account (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are some links: Know Your Meme; The Ballad of @Horse_ebooks; The Human Being Behind…
John Nelson of IDV Solutions put 56 years worth of tornadoes on a map. John plotted each tornado’s path and used brightness for its F-scale (level of intensity). He also added secondary charts for deaths and injuries and frequency by F-scale.
How a New York Times developer reverse engineered @Horse_ebooks –An Interesting » Nieman J’Lab
“
The decisions taken in Dubai in December have the potential to put government handcuffs on the Net. To prevent that — and keep the Internet open and free for the next generations — we need to prevent a fundamental shift in how the Internet is governed.
I encourage you to take action now: Insist that the debate about Internet governance be transparent and open to all stakeholders.
” —Keep the Internet Open (via interestingsnippets)
Vint Cerf’s op-ed in NYT.
(via interestingsnippets)
Mapping America’s bike lanes.
Spanish Government Deploys Robotic Fish to Monitor Maritime Pollution
Currently the port relies on divers to monitor water quality, which is a lengthy process costing €100,000 per year. The divers take water samples from hundreds of points in the port, then send them off for analysis, with the results taking weeks to return. By contrast, the SHOAL robots would continuously monitor the water, letting the port respond immediately to the causes of pollution, such as a leaking boat or industrial spillage, and work to mitigate its effects.
The SHOAL fish are one and a half metres long, comparable to the size and shape of a tuna, but their neon-yellow plastic shell means they are unlikely to be mistaken for the real thing. A range of onboard chemical sensors detect lead, copper and other pollutants, along with measuring water salinity.
They are driven by a dual-hinged tail capable of making tight turns that would be impossible with a propeller-driven robot. They are also less noisy, reducing the impact on marine life.
The robots are battery powered and capable of running for 8 hours between charges. At the moment the researchers have to recover them by boat, but their plan is that the fish will return to a charging station by themselves.
Working in a group, the fish can cover a 1 kilometre-square region of water, down to a depth of 30 metres. They communicate with each other and a nearby base-station using very low-frequency sound waves, which can penetrate the water more easily than radio waves. However, this means the fish have a low data transmission rate and can only send short, predefined messages. “It’s a good solution, but it requires thinking carefully about what data to transmit and how to use that data,” says Kristi Morgansen, a roboticist at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the research.
Robotic fish shoal sniffs out pollution in harbours - environment - 22 May 2012 - New Scientist
via joshbyard:
![Self-updating scripts | High Performance Web Sites
Analyzing your site using Page Speed or YSlow often produces lower scores than you might expect due to 3rd party resources with short cache times. 3rd party snippet owners use short cache times so that users receive updates in a timely fashion, even if this means slowing down the site owner’s page.
[We] wondered if there was a way to have longer cache times and update resources when necessary [and] came up with a solution. It’s simple and reliable. Adopting this pattern will reduce unnecessary HTTP requests resulting in faster pages and happier users, as well as better Page Speed and YSlow scores.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4i7wmXTF51qznh46o1_500.png)
Self-updating scripts | High Performance Web Sites
Analyzing your site using Page Speed or YSlow often produces lower scores than you might expect due to 3rd party resources with short cache times. 3rd party snippet owners use short cache times so that users receive updates in a timely fashion, even if this means slowing down the site owner’s page.
[We] wondered if there was a way to have longer cache times and update resources when necessary [and] came up with a solution. It’s simple and reliable. Adopting this pattern will reduce unnecessary HTTP requests resulting in faster pages and happier users, as well as better Page Speed and YSlow scores.
Commerce Weekly - O'Reilly Radar -
Raise your hand if you’ve showroomed. I’m certainly guilty, and much to retailers’ dismay, this type of shopping behavior is becoming more common. Mobile Commerce Daily reports this week on a new study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) that shows “53 percent of mobile commerce users have stopped an in-store purchase as a result of using their mobile phone.” Joe Lazlo, senior director of the Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence at the IAB told Mobile Commerce Daily the practice of showrooming isn’t likely to go away:
…
Staff contributors from McKinsey & Company call this situation a “retail store apocalypse” in a post over at Forbes. The group says, however, that “showrooming shouldn’t be a show stopper. These digital shoppers are ready to buy. Excelling at multichannel sales is today’s must-have capability, and retailers must adapt if they want to survive.”
Interesting summary of various responses to “showrooming” within O’Reilly Radar’s “Commerce Weekly” round-up post. At very least there’s a word for it. (The linked Forbes piece is solid.)
Personally, getting hassled by salespeople while I’m “showrooming”/researching a product is one way for me to never enter said store again.
Wednesday’s NYTimes crossword puzzle, “Go Home and Rethink Your Life”, is a tribute to Obi Wan Kenobi.