Biweekly links for 09/25/2009

• The Ultimate Productivity Blog
  • Surprisingly good.
• Message To The Australian Government From Anonymous
• Clay Shirky: Let a thousand flowers bloom to replace newspapers; don’t build a paywall around a public good » Nieman Journalism Lab
• That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger – New York Times
  • Wonderful article about the limits of the human mind and body: “‘‘I feel like if I go on, I will die,’’ he says, struggling for words. ‘‘It is everything at the same moment, piled up over and over. Head, muscles, bones. Nobody can understand. You cannot imagine it until you feel it.’’

    A few moments later, he says: ‘‘The pain doesn’t exist for me. I know it is there because I feel it, but I don’t pay attention to it. I sometimes see myself from the other view, looking down at me riding the bike. It is strange, but it happens like that.’’ Robic veers like this when he discusses pain. He talks of incomprehensible suffering one moment and of dreamlike anesthesia the next. If pain is in fact both signal and emotion, perhaps that makes sense. Perhaps the closer we get to its dual nature, the more elusive any single truth becomes, and the better we understand what Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote that ‘‘pain has an element of blank.’’”

• Joho the Blog » [berkman] Clay Shirky on the future of news
  • David Weinberger on Clay Shirky on journalism
• …My heart’s in Accra » Clay Shirky and accountability journalism
  • Ethan Zuckerman on Clay Shirky on Journalism
• Writing Math on the Web » American Scientist
  • Illuminating article about why writing math on the web remains so difficult.
• Academic studies about Wikipedia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • Many fascinating facts:the influence of admins is decreasing over time (from 2003 to 2006); readers are 50/50 male/female, but editors are 60/40 split (would be interesting to know stats for most frequent editors, too); WP has 44 official policies and 248 guidelines, as at September 2007; the “Ignore all rules” rule has become quite complicated (irony!); people have even classified the different types of power plays used by editors; editors come to own particular pages, and this sometimes causes problems; it’s getting harder to become an admin, only 42% of candidates pass the process (sounds like academic peer review…).
• Synthetic biology and evolution : The New Yorker
• The Gömböc shop
  • Get your Gomboc’s here.
• The story of the Gömböc
  • Very cool: the Gomboc is a 3-d object with just a single stable point of equilibrium. That means that if you put it down, it’ll always self-right. Apparently, some tortoises actually have Gomboc-like shells to help them self-right…
• ETH Zurich’s head of research resigns
  • “At ETH Zurich, there are suspicions that scientific data may have been falsified in two publications and a doctoral thesis in 1999 and 2000. At the request of the then group leader Peter Chen, now Vice President Research and Corporate Relations, the Executive Board appointed a panel of experts. It concluded that data had indeed been falsified. However, it is not known for absolute certain who was responsible for the falsifications. Nevertheless, out of respect for ETH Zurich and the function as head of research, Peter Chen has acknowledged his responsibility and decided to step down as Vice President at the end of September 2009.”
• Dan Bricklin: New Modes of Interaction: Some Implications of Microsoft Natal and Google Wave
• Jeff’s Search Engine Caffè: The Winning $1M Netflix Prize Methods Published
  • Links to papers describing the top solutions to the Netflix Prize.
• The Open PhD – What a Concept
  • “I am going to create my own Ph.D. program via open education using open courseware. My degree will be in Educational Technology with an emphasis in (what else?) Open Education as the Great Equalizer. As the tagline to my blog states: it will be all the learning, with none of the “doc”-uments. (Or none of the “cred”-entials). But I will have the knowledge; and, in the end, isn’t that the most important thing? (Oh, and I will still have my $45,000).”
• Nascent: Joi Ito visits Nature
  • Timo Hannay’s notes on Joi Ito’s talk: “CC licensing increases demand but cannibalises sales. So there’s a trade-off depending on the demand and sales of any given piece of work at any given time. The questions about CC licensing are therefore practical ones about what, who and when – not a religious decision. (Though for scientific and certain other types of content, CC believes in free access.)”
• The Story of Google Maps and Google Wave (pdf)

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