Biweekly links for 10/31/2008

• The Business Case for Managed Death – Freakonomics
  • “Critics of the measure point to the story of Barbara Wagner, a cancer patient in neighboring Oregon, whose insurance company denied her request for coverage of potentially life-saving drugs, and instead offered her money for lethal drugs. “
• Ask YC: How to survive grad school?
  • Thoughtful post and comments.
• Is Bayh-Dole Good for Developing Countries? Lessons from the US Experience
  • Surveys the impact of the Bayh-Dole Act and similar legislation around the world.
• Savage Minds » Anthropology as connoisseurship
  • “Why don’t we think of anthropology as a form of connoisseurship any more? … Connoisseurship as a process of cultivation is also about personal transformation—turning into someone who has ‘learned how to look,’ as art history textbook has it.”
• Newsrooms Can Grow Twitter Followers By Using Twitter For Link Journalism – Publishing 2.0
  • A journalist advocates newsrooms using Twitter as a platform to share links to interesting content, not just stories on their own site. Has much that is interesting to say about the (common) disease of just linking to your own content, a problem that reminds me of the bore at the party who just wants to talk about him or herself.
• Coding Horror: The Problem With URLs
  • Points out just how different URLs are to parse out of plain text. The closing parenthesis “)” is apparently legal in a URL, and widely used at places like, e.g., WIkipedia. But a lot of users add URLs in parenthetical remarks; how to tell them apart? Okay, it’s an extra-geeky problem, but still…
• Marginal Revolution: Iceland: what does the endgame look like?
  • Basically, makes the point that Iceland is toast unless a different solution is found:-( Not pretty.
• Science in the open » What Russel Brand and Jonathan Ross can teach us about the value of community norms
  • Cameron Neylon on why licenses are not the answer to concerns about reuse in science.
• Desktop Factory
  • A 3D printer for US $5k.
• LiveJournal Academic Research Bibliography
• …My heart’s in Accra » CSMonitor and the future of international news
  • About the move of the Christian Science Monitor to an all-online model.
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: What Tim O’Reilly gets wrong about the cloud
  • Points out that cloud computing doesn’t naturally get the network effects that occur in many online activities (e.g., FriendFeed or delicious or Facebook). It’s more of a commodity business, and as such anyone can in principle grow their own server farm, and resell time on it, and so it’s not a natural monopoly business.
• The Trouble with “Free Riding” | Freedom to Tinker
  • Excellent dissection of the idea that free riding will be a problem in online content generation. Points out that in many cases the very notion of “free riding” is an oxymoron, for the content creators view their content creation as a joy, not something they do grudgingly, and so the more “free riders” there are, the better. From the outside, this seems pretty obvious, but an awful lot of analysis has missed the point, and it’s made here forcefully.
• On the Google Book Search agreement (Lessig Blog)
  • Lawrence Lessig’s analysis of the recent settlement of the case between the American Association of Publishers, the Authors’ Guild, and Google. Bottom line: Lessig finds much to like in the settlement, and makes some recommendations for further action.
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The centripetal web
  • On the concentration of attention that is going on online, as people increasingly focus attention on the top websites. Links to a post from web traffic company Compete that backs this contention up.
• …My heart’s in Accra » A closer look at a deep blue world
  • Nice survey of the opinions of the rest of the world on the US election, making the case that in many places people just don’t care very much.
• …My heart’s in Accra » Jennifer Bussell on eGovernment, corruption and governance
  • Bussell provides evidence suggesting that the adoption of online tools for Governance is (inversely) linked to the level of corruption in a state.
• Richard Gabriel: Design Beyond Human Abilities
  • First, a mea culpa. I wrote an essay on a similar topic, “Science beyond individual understanding”. I’m a bit embarassed by the title similarity – I’ve looked at Gabriel’s essays before, although I don’t think I’ve read this one. I guess I noticed the title, though, and something stuck; I plead accidental homage. In any case, it’s an essay well worth reading.
• Steve Yegge: A programmer’s view of the Universe, part 1: The fish
• Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work? | Wired
  • Extensive article on open source hardware.
• Crowdsourced Russian translation of my essay “Why the World Needs Quantum Mechanics”
• The Photo-Africa Blog!: Brutal or Amazing. You Decide…
• Jeff Dean – Research Challenges Inspired by Large-Scale Computing at Google.
  • Fascinating colloquium given October 7, 2008. Amongst many tidbits, from around minute 27 we have the detail that Google’s scale is 10^6-10^7 machines (not cores, machines).

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