PQR

Angelo Iezzi — an incredibly well-known and respected pizza maker in Rome — has teamed up with a restaurateur here to open a Roman pizzeria on the Upper East Side. Called PQR, it will sell what’s known as pizza al taglio, or by the cut. This square style of pizza has an airy dough with a crisp bottom and tender interior, and Iezzi is known as a modern master of it.

Imitation vs Reproduction

The Chinese have 2 different concepts of a copy. Fangzhipin (仿製品) are imitations where the difference from the original is obvious. These are small models or copies that can be purchased in a museum shop, for example. The second concept for a copy is fuzhipin (複製品). They are exact reproductions of the original, which, for the Chinese, are of equal value to the original. It has absolutely no negative connotations. The discrepancy with regard to the understanding of what a copy is has often led to misunderstandings and arguments between China and Western museums. The Chinese often send copies abroad instead of originals, in the firm belief that they are not essentially different from the originals. The rejection that then comes from the Western museums is perceived by the Chinese as an insult.

Té Company

Té Company in the West Village is that rare tearoom known as much for its excellent food as for its focused selection of meticulously sourced teas and the care with which they’re served. Credit for that goes to Frederico Ribeiro, a Portuguese-born former Per Se sous chef who eschewed predictable finger sandwiches and scones for a daily-changing menu of seasonal, Iberian-accented small plates, and whole-wheat sourdough bread better than what you could find at the city’s top bakeries.

Lot Sale

New York City has a tradition of selling property for only $1. This token transaction amount, as we mentioned in a previous post, is often used as a development incentive for potential buyers, who need to show they have plans and the funds to execute their vision. Now, thanks to the $1 LOTS project, we can see all of the city-owned lots of land sold to developers for $1 since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in January 2014.

Biggest Field Experiment

A total of 13123 site years of field trials were conducted from 2005 to 2015 for the 3 crops (n=6089 for maize, 3300 for rice and 3734 for wheat), with sites spread across all agro-ecological zones. Each field trial included 2 types of management: conventional farmers’ practice (control) and ISSM-based recommendations (treatment; developed specifically for a given area). The recommended practices were discussed with local experts and participating farmers. Adjustments were made when necessary. Finally, the agreed-upon management technologies were implemented in the fields by the farmer; the collaborators provided guidance on-site during key operations, such as sowing, fertilization, irrigation and harvest. Campaign collaborators recorded fertilizer rate, pesticide and energy use, and calculated nutrient application rate. At maturity, grain yield and above ground biomass were sampled by the collaborators for plots with a size of 6m^2 for wheat and rice, and 10m^2 for maize. Plant samples were dried at 70 °C in a forced-draft oven to constant weight, and grain yield was standardized at 14% moisture for all crops.

Protecting Credit

50% of all Americans still haven’t checked their credit report since the Equifax breach last year exposed the Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses and other personal information on nearly 150M people. If you’re in that 50%, please make an effort to remedy that soon.

Fake news reach

fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news. Falsehoods are often notably different from the all the tweets that have appeared in a user’s timeline 60 days prior to their retweeting them. Fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers created a database of the words that Twitter users used to reply to the 126k contested tweets, then analyzed it with a state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool. Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust.

Jeff Goldblum

the thing about Goldblum that puts him next to Bill Murray in the pantheon of cult figures is that he’s just as charismatic, surreal, legendary, eccentric, brilliant, and handsome in person—at least according to 34 of his famous friends, who, along with the man himself, spoke to GQ about the greatness of Goldblum. He’s an icon to icons, inspiring everyone from Woody Allen and Christopher Walken to Sarah Silverman and Paul Rudd to live their most fun, most delightful, most Goldblum-iest lives. We think there might be a few lessons in there for you, too.

Gray Hat

Most of all, Hutchins was bored, and he wanted to work again. “Not having access to my botnet-monitoring stuff is depressing”. While Hutchins declined to discuss details of his case, except to maintain his innocence — the trial is still pending, though such cases often end in settlements — he feared the damage was already done. Cybersecurity is a business based in trust, and he worried that the allegations alone made him unemployable. (He had recently noticed a number of Twitter bots commenting on his case with anti-American bents, which he speculated could be someone trying to use his case to divide the American cybersecurity community.)