Links for May 4th

Washington Post: Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft joining security company once known as BlackwaterGood Lord, I'm glad that Bush is no longer president. A Computer Scientist in a Business School: An ingenious application of crowdsourcingAfter discovering that product sales increase when reviews are well-written, Zappos has been using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to copyedit reviews …

Links for April 28th

Los Angeles Times: Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles belies its nameTwo member of the famed chorus have come out as straight. To the credit of the chorus, they have been very accepting. asymco: If Cash is King, Apple’s is an EmperorIf Apple didn't take in another dime, their current cash on hand is enough …

Links for April 26th

Letters of Note: On bureaucratese and gobbledygookThis is a delightful memo sent by Civil Aeronautics Board chairman Alfred E. Kahn to the organization's top staff in 1977, begging them to please stop writing in "bureaucratese," and to instead use "straightforward, quasi-conversational, humane prose." He provides some specific examples that still apply nicely today. Wikipedia: List …

Links for April 15th

Jacques Mattheij: Living in the zoneThis is an instructive account of what it's like to be a programmer, for those who don't understand why we're working at 2 AM, or why a quick interruption can be so frustrating. I do my best skiing at the very edge of my abilities—it's trance-like, and a distraction would …

Links for April 12th

PolitiFact: Bob McDonnell says he cut $6 billion from Virginia’s budgetGov. McDonnell keeps claiming that he cut $6B from the budget "by cutting spending, not raising taxes." This is a lie. Spending reductions eliminated just $2.34B from the budget, only slightly more than the $1.9B of funding provided by federal stimulus dollars. (Apparently, federal stimulus …

Links for April 6th

Guardian: Honeybees ‘entomb’ hives to protect against pesticides, say scientistsBees are awesome. New York Times: More Physicians Say No to Endless WorkdaysI'm glad to see that more doctors are ditching the habit of working endless hours. Though I appreciate that a small-town doctor or a specialist has an obligation to always be available, it's great …

Links for March 29th

BBC News: Jordan battles to regain ‘priceless’ Christian relicsSeventy ancient books, made out of lead, have been found in a Jordanian cave. The text is in encoded Hebrew, little of which has been translated. Scholars are debating whether they are of Jewish origin or—far more tantalizingly—very early Christian origin. Village Voice: Women’s Funding Network Sex …

Links for March 28th

Jim Loy: Converse, Inverse, ContrapositiveI never know when to use "converse" versus "interverse." (And I'm not smart enough—and possibly not pretentious enough—to ever use "contrapositive.") Turns out it's pretty straightforward. Philip Greenspun’s Weblog: How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?Forty million dollars? That's just stupid. I really …

Links for March 25th

The Washington Post: Shining some sunlight on $200 million in Virginia tax breaksDelegates David Toscano and Lee Ware propose some more stringent criteria for providing new tax credits. The annual tax credits that Virginia provides to the coal industry alone come to $100M/year, or $15/year/citizen. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: So, How Do We Put Elizabeth …

Links for March 24th

Data Science ToolkitA self-contained virtual machine with a toolkit of brilliant data analysis utilities. Geolocation for IPs, street address to coordinates, coordinates to political divisions—that stuff you'd expect. But it can also pull country, city, and region names out of unstructured text. It can render HTML and return the text that would be displayed in …