“Some of the earliest clues to this came more than two centuries ago. Erasmus Darwin, a grandfather of Charles Darwin, observed in 1794 that staring at a small piece of scarlet silk on white paper for a long time — thereby minimizing (though not stopping) his eye movements — made it grow fainter in color, until it seemed to vanish.” — Vision Is All About Change - NYTimes.com
“For many, the word “Brooklyn” now evokes artisanal cheese rather than rap artists. The disconnect between brownstone Brooklyn’s past and present is jarring in the places where rappers grew up and boasted about surviving shootouts, but where cupcakes now reign.” — Brooklyn, the Remix: A Hip-Hop Tour - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com
“And yet it’s not going away. It could have. There have been a couple of major crashes. But the value has never hit zero, because as William Gibson wrote decades ago, the street finds a use for things.” — Let’s Cut Through the Bitcoin Hype: A Hacker-Entrepreneur’s Take | Wired Opinion | Wired.com
“The new story was that the botched Cypriot bank bail-in scared so many people into thinking their deposits weren’t safe that they moved into Bitcoins instead. Prices quadrupled again — from $65 to $266 — in just three weeks.” — Bitcoin Is No Longer a Currency - Matthew O’Brien - The Atlantic
Calvin: If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.
Hobbes: How so?
Calvin: Well, when you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.
(via taylordavidson)
“Nurses, in contrast, are more likely to define good teamwork as a relationship in which everyone’s input counts.” — Healing the Hospital Hierarchy - NYTimes.com
“Crawls can be more open-ended and investigative as well, whereas an API is more about putting a square peg in a square hole. API’s also don’t offer competitive advantage; everyone has access to the same stuff. A clever crawl can help build a moat.” — “The Almighty API,” Crawling and The Programmable Web – ReadWrite
“If you need certain attributes, like real-time or speed, certain capabilities, or certain pieces of infrastructure, there are thousands of amazing APIs out there. But if your business runs on data, crawling is the only way to go.” — “The Almighty API,” Crawling and The Programmable Web – ReadWrite
“Social graphs can show a wide variety of different relationships – all of the examples covered here and in part 1 have focused on comments between members but it is also useful to visualize relationships such as members viewing other members’ content and members assigning tasks to other members. Members can also be grouped together into departments to see the connectivity between departments within an organisation.” — Using Social Graphs to Understand Enterprise Social Network Usage (Part 2) | Business 2 Community
“SBS session: “Making the Invisible Visible.” The next frontier for social software is to integrate with Big Data to make interaction patterns within the enterprise and across institutions visible so that executives can develop a new set of leading performance indicators and employees can get better insight into what drives their own performance.” — Who are the speakers? | Social Business Summit
“The system created a map of all these interactions that was mashed against the performance data and key metrics of the consultants and teams involved. It turns out that tightly integrated teams, the belief they held paramount, were not the high performers.” — Why Don’t We Dig Deeper into the Sand of Social Data - Forbes
“Last month, we saw Nike’s Stefan Olander present the Nike FuelBand at GigaOm’s Roadmap 2012 conference. It’s not hard to draw the line from this activity-monitoring device to consumer offerings that will monitor and give instant feedback on a litany of biometric data in real time.” — As Augmented Reality Blurs Lines, How Will Companies Respond?
“Predictably, countries with measurable real-life ties — like a border, a number of international flights or a serious trade relationship — tend to e-mail more. But there are discrepancies, as well: Countries in the European Economic Area, for instance, e-mail far less than the research model predicted, and countries with colonial ties to the U.K. don’t e-mail any more as a result.” — An incredible map of which countries e-mail each other, and why
“Since then, he’s built Azkaban, an open source scheduler for batch processes such as Hadoop jobs, and Kafka, another open source tool that Kreps called “the big data equivalent of a message broker.” — How and why LinkedIn is becoming an engineering powerhouse — Tech News and Analysis
Bijan Sabet: Some thoughts on wearable computing -
Wearable computing has arrived.
It’s still early days for sure but even today I have two devices with me pretty much all the time — my mobile phone and a Nike Fuelband.
I’m excited about the future of wearable connected devices. My Fuelband is powerful but physically clunky, software isn’t…