Biweekly links for 08/17/2009

  • Project Chanology – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    • Excellent Wikipedia article on the confrontations between Anonymous and the Church of Scientology.
  • rehash.nl
    • Archive of materials (including video) from the series of hacker conferences in the Netherlands.
  • Measuring Distances in Google Maps
    • How to measure distances along customized routes in Google Maps.
  • DebugAdvisor: A Recommender System for Debugging – Microsoft Research
    • “In large software development projects, when a programmer is assigned a bug to fix, she typically spends a lot of time searching (in an ad-hoc manner) for instances from the past where similar bugs have been debugged, analyzed and resolved. Systematic search tools that allow the programmer to express the context of the current bug, and search through diverse data repositories associated with large projects can greatly improve the productivity of debugging. This paper presents the design, implementation and experience from such a search tool called DebugAdvisor.

      The context of a bug includes all the information a programmer has about the bug, including natural language text, textual rendering of core dumps, debugger output etc.

      Our key insight is to allow the programmer to collate this entire context as a query to search for related information. Thus, DebugAdvisor allows the programmer to search using a fat query, which could be kilobytes of structured and unstructured data…”

  • Happiness and unhappiness in east and west: Themes…[Emotion. 2009] – PubMed Result
    • Why studies which ask people to self-assess “happiness” on some scale are of dubious utility (what do they measure?): “Cultural folk models of happiness and unhappiness are likely to have important bearings on social cognition and social behavior… the authors systematically analyzed American and Japanese participants’ spontaneously produced descriptions of the two emotions and observed… that whereas Americans associated positive hedonic experience of happiness with personal achievement, Japanese associated it with social harmony. Furthermore, Japanese were more likely than Americans to mention both social disruption and transcendental reappraisal as features of happiness… descriptions of unhappiness included various culture-specific coping actions: Whereas Americans focused on externalizing behavior (e.g., anger and aggression), Japanese highlighted transcendental reappraisal and self-improvement. Implications for research on culture and emotion are discussed.”
  • Genesis 1 – LOLCat Bible Translation Project
    • “Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs

      1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

      2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

      3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1”

  • Scylla and Charybdis
    • “Institutions need both fixed representations and novel representations to remain organized and retain people’s attention. Interpretive traditions, where the interpretand is fixed, face a special challenge in this regard. That they are able to resolve it successfully, most of the time, is a testament to the immense skill of our species as information managers.”
  • Thinking about Mario, Pompeii and the internet – confused of calcutta
  • co5TARS
    • Fun and informative way of visualizing the careers of actors, directors, etc.

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.