Archive for the ‘the column’ Category

Galiana and Green find that devoting just 0.2% of global GDP - roughly $100 billion a year - to green energy R&D would produce the kind of game-changing breakthroughs needed to fuel a carbon-free future. Not only would this be a much less expensive fix than trying to cut carbon emissions, but it would also reduce global warming far more quickly. And, unlike carbon cuts, this is a solution that developing countries would be likely to embrace.

.:politiken.dk->

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Posted: November 7th, 2010
at 6:10pm by Koookiecrumbles


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Why such caution? Well, attempts at diplomatic informality - and especially humour - can backfire. In a speech in 2009, Deborah Jones, US Ambassador toAKuwait, picked up a local joke referring to some women members of the Kuwaiti parliament as 'cats'. The Ambassador suggested that if women MPs were cats, maybe male MPs were dogs. This was not, ahem, well received.

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Posted: November 7th, 2010
at 5:48pm by Koookiecrumbles


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A whole new universe opened up following the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and its application to examining live human brains. One flavor of MRI tracks the diffusion of water molecules within the brain, which betrays the pattern of axons stretched across the organ. This image reveals severe disruptions in the bottom area of the brain, where the patient has suffered a stroke.

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Posted: November 6th, 2010
at 5:25pm by Koookiecrumbles


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This, however, is not the danger. The danger lies at a certain point in your information intake called the tipping point. This is the point in the journey where you stop learning at an incredibly fast pace and now you begin to form your own opinions. You stop having this hunger for knowledge and start thinking you know quite a bit. And this is because the world is set up like a ladder. And the further up the ladder you get, the farther you are able to look out onto the world. Your perspective widens, you are able to understand and see more. But you also begin to look down the ladder, seeing that you know more than the people below you.

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Posted: November 6th, 2010
at 4:47pm by Koookiecrumbles


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When someone farts - a cloud of stink emanates out from its point of origin in lesser density (think heat map). You know around where it came from; yet if there is someone sitting close by, they may be blamed for the fart! Uh oh, you just blamed the wrong person for the fart.AThis is exactly what happens when you start thinking that there is an important correlation between the mouse and eye tracking. Nielsen Norman Group even found that people will use their mouse to select some text to make it more readable because the IA is terrible on a page. What is a mouse tracker going to tell you about that? That a giant block of text is where people's cursor is going to loiter?

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Posted: November 6th, 2010
at 4:31pm by Koookiecrumbles


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Gabe Newell of Valve on his dream setup:AThe main thing is to have a process more than a single particular setup. I’ve tried all sorts of home-built systems, including water cooled, phase change, etc… The conclusion I’ve reached is that upgrading every 6 months is more important than trying to get the fastest possible system at one point of time. The time and energy I used to spend optimizing my hardware I now spend making sure it’s easy to swap out my current machine for a new machine with the least downtime.

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Posted: November 6th, 2010
at 4:11pm by Koookiecrumbles


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Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it's all gone sideways. I decided to try to index these new entitiesato draft a sort of Social Media Bestiary. Here is the Social Index.

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Posted: November 5th, 2010
at 8:12pm by Koookiecrumbles


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A federal jury has decided a Minnesota woman owes $1.5 million for sharing 24 songs over the Internet. AJurors determined Wednesday that Jammie Thomas-Rasset owes $62,500 per song. ALast year, a federal jury found Thomas-Rasset willfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs. She was ordered to pay $1.92 million in damages, or $80,000 per song.

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Posted: November 5th, 2010
at 8:07pm by Koookiecrumbles


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It is often said (and quite correctly) that if you finish all bees in the world, the world would not survive for long. We could use that as an allegory for the sciences /mathematics as well. Erds was essentially a bee. Brilliant in multiple areas of mathematics, he traveled from place to place using one idea from one area into another, cross-pollinating them, generating interest with his lovable anecdotes and enriching Mathematics as a consequence. A welcome departure from the so called purists.

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Posted: November 5th, 2010
at 7:59pm by Koookiecrumbles


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