There are a tremendous number of new and exciting business opportunities emerging all over the continent. The mobile telephony revolution is just the most visible of these; it is just the tip of the iceberg.
Month: June 2007
NASA Wants to Partner with Private Space Moguls
I see a day in the not very distant future, where instead of NASA buying a vehicle, we buy a ticket for our astronauts to ride to low-Earth orbit, or a bill of lading for a cargo delivery to space station by a private operator.
LocationAware.org
efforts to make geo-awareness a browser standard
Privacy International self-owns
Privacy International should feel remorse about walking right past several other companies to single out Google for their lowest rating. But I think that there’s a larger danger here too. I believe this report could corrode earnest efforts to improve privacy at companies around the internet. Why? Because the bottom-line takeaway message that I got from the report is that a company can work hard on privacy issues and still get dragged into the mud.
pandering to technophobes
What A Change in 35 Years
David Schonauer of American Photo has uncovered a rather stunning coincidence, the picture that’s been making the rounds of P.H. being hauled back to jail was taken by none other than Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut. Nick Ut, as you remember from Photo History 101, was the photographer who took one of the iconic pictures of the Vietnam war, the picture of Kim Phuc running naked down a country lane after suffering serious napalm burns. Ut’s photograph was arguably the apex of the notion of “The Concerned Photographer,” Cornell Capa’s phrase for the idea that photographs of injustices and atrocities could help correct the situations that led to them. And get this: the 2 pictures were taken exactly 35 years apart, to the day. Quite a coincidence.
ah the irony
cult of mac
jobs with accolytes
Abolish small towns
The state should no longer subsidise the private pursuit of Arcadia through expensive public services for sparsely populated areas. The countryside should be considered a luxury—reserved for wildlife, unmanned agriculture and electric coaches full of gawking tourists. We should abolish villages and make everyone live in towns of at least 25000.
+1
Cancelled
The city council of Glasgow is fighting illegal handbills with science: they’re paying city workers to go around and stick “cancelled” stickers on all the illegal gig posters put up around town.
memetic warfare
Legal Swearing
A US appeals court overruled federal regulators who decided that expletives uttered on broadcast television violated decency standards
the religious nuts have shoved us around for too long anyway
Research is false
There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.
Ioannidis presents a Bayesian analysis of the problem which most people will find utterly confusing. Here’s the idea in a diagram.
Suppose there are 1000 possible hypotheses to be tested. There are an infinite number of false hypotheses about the world and only a finite number of true hypotheses so we should expect that most hypotheses are false. Let us assume that of every 1000 hypotheses 200 are true and 800 false.It is inevitable in a statistical study that some false hypotheses are accepted as true. In fact, standard statistical practice guarantees that at least 5% of false hypotheses are accepted as true. Thus, out of the 800 false hypotheses 40 will be accepted as “true,” i.e. statistically significant.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 