W3C: Personal names around the worldThe World Wide Web Consortium has put together this great document about how people's names differ globally, and the implications of those differences on website and database development. I've long preferred simply providing a "name" field—none of this "first name" "last name" business—and this reassures me that this is the [...]
Macleans OnCampus: Is this what 17-year-old students are really like?I think Beloit College's annual Mindset List is wretched. Every year it's full of mistakes, exaggerations, and generally poor thinking. I'm glad to see McLeans acknowledge this. DejeroNews stations are either loving their Dejero or coveting one. It's like a whole news truck in a suitcase, [...]
MSNBC: Santorum—GOP not ‘anti-science’Good for Jon Huntsman for acknowledging that the first step to getting the Republican Party out of the intellectual wilderness is to stop being anti-science. (Anti-science is anti-facts, and being anti-facts doesn't work for long.) Unsurprisingly, Rick Santorum says that his party isn't anti-science. He claims, by inference, that Huntsman asserted that [...]
Bloomberg: Climate-Change Scientist Cleared in Closing of U.S. Data-Altering InquiryThe National Science Foundation has completed its inquiry into UVA/Penn State climatologist Michael Mann. They have entirely exonerated him, finding no evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever. That's the same result as Penn State's investigation, the NOAA's inspector general's investigation (which was done at the request of [...]
CBS News: Like Every Administration, White House Defends Obama "Vacation"President Obama has taken 38 days of vacation so far in his presidency. At this point in Bush's presidency, he'd taken 102 days of vacation. Rick Perry’s Texas A&M TranscriptRepublican presidential candidate Rick Perry's academic record is on par with President Bush's—which is to say, very [...]
Physorg: Human precursors went to sea, team says130,000 year-old stone tools have been found on Crete. What with being an island, that means that hominids that predate homo sapiens managed to cross open water. That was an ability that researchers had long chalked up to being one of those things that makes us special, but [...]
Wikipedia: Ellis IslandThe waters around the Statue of Liberty are owned by New Jersey, but the land on which the statute sits is owned by New York. The adjacent Ellis Island is largely owned by New Jersey, which the Supreme Court ruled in 1998 has the right to all parts of the island that were [...]
Cult of Mac: How the Editor of Windows Magazine Became an Apple FanboyA lot of us Mac users started off as hardcore DOS/Windows fans. Wikipedia: Full moon namesThere are special names to refer to the full moon in every month. August's is the "grain moon," April's 's the "egg moon," February's is the "snow moon," [...]
The post-debt-ceiling poll numbers are in, and they’re not good for Republicans. A CNN poll released today finds the Republican Party is down to a 33% approval rating, vs. a 47% approval rating for the Democratic Party. Speaker John Boehner’s approval rating has dropped ten points in the past three weeks, down to 33%, while [...]
The Washington Post: Fewer dinners mean meaner politicsSince Gingrich's cohort of Republicans came into office in 1994, there has been a steady decline in bipartisan socialization and, indeed, socialization at all. He exhorted freshmen to return to their districts whenever possible, to be in D.C. only when absolutely necessary. The result is a dangerous loss [...]
journoterrorist: How to Build a Newsroom Time MachineThis group of college journalism students were assigned the task of producing a publication using only thirty-year-old technology. They learned a lot. MSNBC: Firm gives $1 million to pro-Romney group, dissolvesW Spann LLC was formed in March, gave a million dollars to a pro-Romney super PAC, and then [...]
I mentioned in June that I’d gotten an award from the White House. Now they’re promoting it on their website. On the “Champions of Change” site—that’s the award that I got—they’re featuring the sixteen of us who received awards on that occasion, all in the realm of open data technology. I was in awfully good [...]
On O’Reilly Radar, Andy Oram makes this important point about apps contests: It’s now widely recognized that most of the apps produced by government challenges are quickly abandoned. None of the apps that won awards at the original government challenge–Vivek Kundra’s celebrated Apps for Democracy contest in Washington, DC–still exist. He went on to explain [...]
Aloha EditorI love this HTML5 WYSIWYG editor. They had me at the introductory paragraph, what with the editing of it. I haven't implemented it anywhere, but I love the concept. Slow Clap for CongressDear Congress, For your leadership, your maturity, and your inspiring ability to perform the basic duties of your job, We applaud you. [...]
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