June 2012
95 posts
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Deux ex machina →
Is this FUD? I don’t know.
I DO know that the McAfee Labs person who wrote this has a pleasing command of the English language with a nice sense of wry humor, well, perspective. I rarely enjoy reading a malware forensic analysis quite this much. Plus there was a great pic, that huge visualization shaped like an incredibly foreboding and ominous tornado.
Jumping Into the Flames of...
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A History of the Timeline →
empiricator:
While historical texts have long been subject to critical analysis, the formal and historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored. This is no small matter; graphic representation is among our most…
What does history look like?
How do you draw time?
*BiblioOdyssey is one of my favorite map-related websites.
May 2012
71 posts
6 tags
Complexity as a Catalyst of Market Failure
Found by the wise and kind-hearted @CreditPlumber nearly a year ago, but still a good read.
Note Well!
This is lengthy, and many pages are more than half footnotes. But that is okay, as they are often clarifying definitions, making this a VERY accessible paper to read, even if one is more of a math, physics or computer science type rather than an economist.
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GIS Analysis with WebGL →
roomthily:
real-time hillshade of a DEM
and there went my afternoon.
WebGL is amazing. It just… IS. I love Chrome browser.
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Ballot recount in New York →
Curious about the accuracy of those much maligned voting machines? Here’s an opportunity to validate their accuracy, or margin of error.
A recent election for the state Senate in a precinct of New York City was very close. A hand recount of the votes was requested. The results are in. And one of my favorite blogs the details.
No, it is not a political blog.
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Troves of Personal Data, Forbidden to Researchers →
Huge repositories of data collected by Internet companies are not accessible to scientists, leading some to complain that studies based on these data can’t be peer-reviewed.
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QR Fuzzing Fun →
QR codes are very interesting for attackers as they can store a large quantity of information, from under 1000 up to 7000 characters, perfect for a malicious payload, and QR codes can be encrypted… There are malicious QR codes that abuse permissive apps to compromise system and user data.
This attack is known as “attagging”.
Also QR codes can be used as an attack vector… I have...
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Machine learning in Wonderland: bigger data or...
empiricator:
Data flows in constantly and time-sensitive predictions need to be made in order to efficiently manage supply volatility. Solving this problem requires machine learning, econometrics, and statistical tools.
Bigger Data or better algorithms?
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xkcd: EST →
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Cuba to allow its people to come and go at will?... →
demons:
HAVANA — After controlling the comings and goings of its people for five decades, communist Cuba appears on the verge of a momentous decision to lift many travel restrictions. One senior official says a “radical and profound” change is weeks away.
The comment by Parliament Chief Ricardo Alarcon has residents, exiles and policymakers abuzz with speculation that the much-hated exit visa...
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“The other implication is that every website you visit that includes “tweet this”...”
– Daring Fireball Linked List: Twitter Is Tracking You on the Web
Gee, thanks for the privacy tip, guy who uses Google Analytics on your site!
via mwfrost
HAHAHAHA.
via pegobry
Ummm… guess what: This is equally applicable with Facebook.
But the near ubiquity of Google Analytics, that...
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Maurice Sendak interview →
alexandrak:
found via twitter from @francis_lam
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End Casino Capitalism and Resurrect Glass-Steagall →
via Robert Reich:
…President Obama’s “attack” on private equity is neither a personal attack on Mitt Romney nor a generalized attack on American business.
It’s an attack on a particular kind of capitalism… Using other peoples’ money to make big bets which, if they go wrong, can wreak havoc on the economy. It’s the substitution of casino capitalism for real capitalism, the...
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Charlie Stross on the State of Big Ideas in... →
technoccult:
In my rant about the new aesthetic of the future, I complained that there were few, if any, genuinely new visions of the future coming out of science fiction. Post-cyberpunk Author Neal Stephenson has been complaining about the lack of innovation in science fiction. Sci-fi author Charlie Stross …
Charlie Stross was more innovative, no, let’s just try...
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Grep hipster →
Get your fill of tumblr hipsters.
Full plate, main course or side-dish, it’s your choice.
via the not-so-plain PlainFlavored.
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Making Data Meaningful →
Open data is a wonderful thing!
Yet this may be better, or equally wonderful:
A Guide to Making Data Meaningful
The Making Data Meaningful guides are intended as a practical tool to help managers, statisticians and media relations officers in statistical organizations use text, tables, charts, maps and other devices to bring statistics to life for non-statisticians.
First there is a guide about...
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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly... →
The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly the large deviations …
Reader submitted photograph (front jacket cover) for Amazon listing of N.N. Taleb’s The Black Swan, First Edition, April 2007.
I noticed this today. It is the entire first chapter of N.N. Taleb’s The Black Swan as it appeared in The New York Times in April...
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Violation of code.google.com project hosting... →
The Web Malware Collection Project
A collection of web application backdoors and malware, in PHP, JSP, ASP, etc.
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How to make your own IBM System/360 →
A more accurate description is a virtual S/360, or rather, System 390.
Lars, the kindly webmaster of beagle-ears.com, recounts the history of the IBM systems 360, 370, 3090 and 390, otherwise known as mainframes or Big Iron. He describes the open-source, free (though not supported) Hercules simulator for systems z/OS, for Linux.
Of course, it is VM rather than MVS, for developers.
UPDATE
I...
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News Corp Acquires Entire English Language →
It is only satire, not real. Not for now.
News Corp announced yesterday that it has acquired the troubled Oxford English Dictionary and its struggling holding company The Entire English Language LLC, which is in receivership, giving the media conglomerate exclusive rights to more than 995,000 English words. An exultant Rupert Murdoch… explained: “Every bozo is chasing digital content on a...
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No Mongol invasions in Europe this year
via FT Alphaville: On the plus side, no Mongol invasions in Europe this year
Gorgeous timelapse of European state-making, 1000-2003:
Does it, er, say anything about the eurozone or sovereign finances in 2012? Yeah we think so - if only to remind that it took centuries to make little fiscal unions all over Europe.
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My piece on the history of facial recognition... →
evgenymorozov:
The essay below runs in the April 5 issue of the London Review of Books. I post it here for educational purposes only!
==
In Your Face
Evgeny Morozov
Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance by Kelly Gates
NYU Press, 261 pp, £15.99, March…
Machine Learning for Email →
adamlaiacano:
Drew Conway and John Myles White posted the code used in their O’Reilly book Machine Learning for Email on github. Check it out to see implementations (all in R) of priority inbox, spam classification, and other algorithms.
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The Underground Economist: Is it worth it to write... →
undergroundeconomist:
For the past several years, a surplus of other people’s ideas has been a recurring theme in my life. I knew one guy who was writing down his ideas constantly as if they were worth a fortune, then dutifully opening bugs for each and every one. These bugs would then languish in the bug tracking…
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“…a software tool for detecting equations and hidden mathematical...”
– Notational: Eureqa
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Update: Turns out not everyone has an iPhone →
cnnmoneytech:
Apple fanboys are some of the most humorless people on the planet. Turns out they also are responsible for a lot of the crap that appears in tech blogs.
NPD and comScore released their latest smartphone market share figures yesterday, revealing that Android still maintains a sizable lead …
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“Hacking and investing are similar in that both involve making sense of complex...”
– tejus sawjiani: zerolens
An apt analogy by zerolens
The similarities continue into forensics, be it IT audit, or regulatory investigation. To do either well, it is vital to be able to think as though on the other side.
I would take that even further, and say that if one had experience in all four... 