JournoGeekery

Michael Wines, An Underground Pool Drying Up Portions of the...

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:30:05 -0400

Michael Wines, An Underground Pool Drying Up

Portions of the High Plains Aquifer are rapidly being depleted by farmers who are pumping too much water to irrigate their crops, particularly in the southern half in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Levels have declined up to 242 feet in some areas, from predevelopment — before substantial groundwater irrigation began — to 2011. (via An Underground Pool Drying Up - Graphic - NYTimes.com)

"Why the hell do I have to keep updating the apps on my iPhone all the time?"

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:45:09 -0400

“Why the hell do I have to keep updating the apps on my iPhone all the time?”

- John McCain to Apple CEO Tim Cook at Today’s Senate Hearing - Daring Fireball (via shaneguiter)

"Most are driven mainly by curiosity rather than the desire to show off their certificates to any..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:15:54 -0400

“Most are driven mainly by curiosity rather than the desire to show off their certificates to any potential employer, and none has paid for a verified certificate. Consider Anna Nachesa, a 42-year-old single mother in a village near Amsterdam who logs on to MOOCs for several hours each night after dinner with her teenage kids. She has always found TV boring, she says, and for her, MOOCs replace reading books. She is a physicist by training, with a degree from Moscow State University, and she works as a software developer. “This stuff is actually addictive,” she says. In some ways the lure is like Everest: Some want to climb it to see if they can. “The Dutch have the proverb ‘If you never shoot, you already missed,’” she says.”

- What Professors Can Learn From ‘Hard Core’ MOOC Students - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education (via infoneer-pulse)

emergentfutures: Is There Really a Second-Term...

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:30:19 -0400

emergentfutures:

Is There Really a Second-Term Curse?

President Obama is facing one of his roughest stretches in office after questions about the government’s response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the admission by the Internal Revenue Service that it inappropriately targeted conservative groups which sought tax-exempt status, and the revelation that the Justice Department subpoenaed communications by The Associated Press.

In reaction, some commentators have written about a second-term curse – the supposed tendency of presidencies to unravel, especially because of scandal, in their second term.

Full Story: Nate Silver at NYT

"Alarmed by the scope and audacity of the breach, the company went public with the news in January..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:45:16 -0400

“Alarmed by the scope and audacity of the breach, the company went public with the news in January 2010, becoming the first U.S. firm to voluntarily disclose an intrusion that originated in China. In a blog post, Google chief legal officer David Drummond said hackers stole the source code that powers Google’s vaunted search engine and also targeted the e-mail accounts of activists critical of China’s human rights abuses. As Google was responding to the breach, its technicians made another startling discovery: its database with years of information on surveillance orders had been hacked. The database included information on thousands of orders issued by judges around the country to law enforcement agents seeking to monitor suspects’ e-mails. The most sensitive orders, however, came from a federal court that approves surveillance of foreign targets such as spies, diplomats, suspected terrorists and agents of other governments. Those orders, issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are classified.”

- Chinese hackers who breached Google gained access to sensitive data, U.S. officials say - The Washington Post (via infoneer-pulse)

"Can Karp put on the big-boy pants, hire a Sheryl Sandberg character, and create a money-making..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:45:08 -0400

“Can Karp put on the big-boy pants, hire a Sheryl Sandberg character, and create a money-making machine? Because if he’s not sure, and he’s not ready for a long, hard, uphill fight, he should sell.”

- Alexia Tsotsis, David Karp’s Dilemma (via stoweboyd)

timeshaiku: A haiku from the article: ‘Woke Up Lonely,’ by...

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:16:23 -0400

timeshaiku:

A haiku from the article: ‘Woke Up Lonely,’ by Fiona Maazel

Airline Creates Bespoke Novels Timed That Last As Long As The Flight

Sun, 19 May 2013 15:30:23 -0400

Airline Creates Bespoke Novels Timed That Last As Long As The Flight:

drewvigal:

The Australian airline Qantas aims to provide a unique experience by offering a selection of specially curated books, each of which is just long enough to last the duration of your flight.

Some forward thinking of providing media tailored to the environment it’s meant to be consumed. File under media moment.

techspotlight: Yahoo’s board has approved a deal to buy New...

Sun, 19 May 2013 15:17:00 -0400

techspotlight:

Yahoo’s board has approved a deal to buy New York-based blogging service Tumblr for $1.1bn (£725m; 857m euros), US media reports say. The acquisition is expected to be announced on Monday. The deal was a “foregone conclusion” and was a unanimous vote by the board, tech blog AllThingsD reported, citing sources close to the matter. If confirmed, it will be CEO Marissa Mayer’s largest deal since taking the helm of Yahoo in July 2012 Analysts say that by acquiring Tumblr, Yahoo would gain a larger social media presence and enhance its ability to attract younger audiences. It will also help Tumblr generate more revenue from advertisements. On its home page, Tumblr says it hosts 108 million blogs, with 50.7 billion posts between them. Under the terms of the acquisition, Tumblr would continue to operate as an independent business, the Wall Street Journal said, citing unnamed sources familiar with the situation. (via BBC News - Yahoo ‘to buy Tumblr for $1.1bn’)

UPDATE: Business Insider says “David Karp Says Yahoo Is Not Buying Tumblr”. But we’ll see what’s officially announced tomorrow, after another 24hrs of anonymous sources, position analysis, stock shorting and speculation.

The NYT's Amanda Cox on Winning the Internet - Features - Source: An OpenNews project

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:45:10 -0400

The NYT's Amanda Cox on Winning the Internet - Features - Source: An OpenNews project:

Via:

Interesting stuff on what does well online> MT @albertocairo: summary of @amandacox’s@openvisconf keynote source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles… #dataviz
— Peter Aldhous (@paldhous) May 18, 2013

Breaking Development Orlando 2013: Pitfalls & Triumphs of...

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:15:17 -0400

Breaking Development Orlando 2013: Pitfalls & Triumphs of the Cross-Screen Experience by Cameron Moll. Via HTML5Weekly, which describes it thus:

A video presentation from Breaking Development Orlando 2013 where Cameron Moll walks through what’s required to present a consistent Web experience to users regardless of where the experience begins, continues, and ends.

Emergent Futures Tumblelog: The Community, Tumblr and Yahoo - Do we Protest?

Sat, 18 May 2013 15:30:14 -0400

Emergent Futures Tumblelog: The Community, Tumblr and Yahoo - Do we Protest?:

emergentfutures:

There are a couple of services that are really important to my life and my business. One of them is Tumblr and the other is Evernote. In promoting Evernote for example I often tell people that if Microsoft buys it I will retire. That is because it has become so important to my work flow and because of my view that large corporations hardly ever get these sort of services right.

Tumblr is equally important to me in a different way and I am part of the community and honoured to be one of the Tech editors, and have almost 200,000 followers.

There are rumours going around that Yahoo is in negotiations to buy Tumblr which worries me a hell of a lot. Let me be clear that I have no problems with the founders and investors making money off the contributions of the community but I worry what would happen to Tumblr in the hands of a large entity.

In a world where business models like these require both the founders and investors to contribute and create but the community to contribute and create as well, valuations and business strategies have a different flavour. No community and there is no business valuation.

If you have similar concerns then please reblog or like this post. I intend such support to be a signal to both Tumblr and Yahoo (if the rumours are true) that the community is concerned and should be involved in the decision making process. Maybe that is thinking with delusions of grandeur or maybe it isn’t - over to you the community to decide

Paul Higgins

"The loss of tropical rain forests is likely to reduce the energy output of hydroelectric projects in..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 12:45:16 -0400

“The loss of tropical rain forests is likely to reduce the energy output of hydroelectric projects in countries like Brazil that are investing billions of dollars to create power to support economic growth.”

- Felicity Barringer, NYTimes. Good, quick read. (via climateadaptation)

Avoiding Unnecessary Paints - HTML5 Rocks

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:15:46 -0400

Avoiding Unnecessary Paints - HTML5 Rocks:

Rendering performance is critical to users enjoying your application, and you should always aim to keep your paint workload under 16ms. To help you do that, you should integrate using DevTools throughout your development process to identify and fix bottlenecks as they arise.

Inadvertent interactions, particularly on paint-heavy elements, can be very costly and will kill rendering performance.

Via HTML5Weekly.

5 Things You Should Stop Doing With jQuery

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:30:06 -0400

5 Things You Should Stop Doing With jQuery:

Best of the set: .grep() or .map() instead of defaulting to .each() with conditional logic inside. I’m sure there’s a blog post out there about the speed of jQuery vs. Underscore’s implementations….

Follow-up: JSWeekly #130 points to a comparison of Underscore’s .map() and .reduce(), their performance and ECMAScript5’s inclusion of them as [].map() and [].reduce().

Also, the non-jQuery tip for >IE8-browsers for document.querySelector('#list') and document.querySelectorAll('#list li') is helpful food-for-thought, too.

Via JSWeekly #129.

A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: On cellular encryption

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:45:18 -0400

A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: On cellular encryption:

Cellular eavesdropping seems a lot more tractable [than land-line eavesdropping], if only because mobile calls are conducted on a broadcast channel. That means you can wiretap with almost no carrier involvement. In fact there’s circumstancial[sic] evidence that this already happening — just by different parties than you’d think. According to a new book by reporters Marc Ambinder and Dave Brown:

The FBI has quietly removed from several Washington, D.C.–area cell phone towers, transmitters that fed all data to wire rooms at foreign embassies.

This raises a few questions: once you’ve tapped someone’s cellular signals, what do you do with the data? Isn’t it all encrypted? And how easy would it be for the US or some foreign government to lay their hands on the plaintext?

All of this which serves as a wonderful excuse to noodle about the state of modern cellular encryption. Be warned that this is not going to be a short post! For those who don’t like long articles, here’s the TL;DR: cellular encryption is a whole lot worse than you think.

Love this blog. Emphasis mine though it was already italicized.

Scoops and Software: How The New York Times Tells Stories With Data | Fast Company Labs

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:10:33 -0400

Scoops and Software: How The New York Times Tells Stories With Data | Fast Company Labs:

Embedded in the heart of the New York Times, Aron Pilhofer runs an experimental news team made up of veteran journalists and top-notch computer scientists. Their job is to tell stories using software, data, and old-fashioned journalistic skills. Here’s how they do it.

In case you’re curious about my team and colleagues. (I’m currently not paying attention to our team’s informal show ‘n tell about new infrastructure tricks.)

pacificstand: Why the New Google Maps is the Most Honest Form...

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:36:46 -0400

pacificstand:

Why the New Google Maps is the Most Honest Form of Cartography

Is the hot dog vendor who stands on a street corner as worthy of inclusion as the bank on the same corner? That decision still lay with mapmakers—in this case a giant internet company. Google’s solution to the problem was to remove itself from the equation. Its map maker tool, much lauded for its use in creating usable maps of North Korea and now slowly being rolled out in other countries, allows users to mark locations in a Wikipedia-like fashion.

The new product goes further. It says on the tin that this is map is made for you: “a billion maps, one for each user,” as Google’s lead map designer, Jonah Jones, told TechCruch. What about advertising? Of course Google will use your information to serve you ads. That is what it does. And as on other Google products, ads will be clearly marked.

The idea of “mental maps”, or how individuals see the world, is an old one, used by artists and ethnographers and New Yorker cover designers. What Google has done is to bring the mental map to a service used by several million people. With one for every user, maps can never again lay claim to—or even give the illusion of—neutrality. Despite its restrictive nature, such a map frees us to see the world anew.

Read more at Quartz

chartsnthings: Sketches from Money on the Bench

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:24:14 -0400

chartsnthings: Sketches from Money on the Bench:

chartsnthings:

On Monday we published something a little different than most of the graphics we make – a running, updating tracker of how much money major league teams are paying to players on the disabled list.

I love sports, but I’m not a huge baseball fan and I’m neutral on the Yankees scale – I don’t…

Gamasutra - Why Candy Box became more social than ‘social...

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:12:00 -0400

Gamasutra - Why Candy Box became more social than ‘social games’

The game…is so minimalistic that it recalls a beloved earlier age of games, when all of them were opaque and mysterious, and the only real way to progress was to share playground lore.

In the early stages of Candy Box, it seems impossible that there should be a dragon somewhere in the game, but while you’re still counting candies and fighting tree trunks for practice, seeing on Twitter that people are planting trees and using acid rain spells against a castle beast sounds like a myth you’re determined to see for yourself.

As childhood gamers, everyone always had that friend with the false boast about what happens later in a game you yourself can’t conquer. Or you learned about secrets and easter eggs through rumor and conversation, things you never thought to try for yourself.

Via colleague Erik Hinton on a work distribution list.