April 2010
18 posts
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March 2010
63 posts
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WatchAn elementary school puts on Scarface as a play.
The angry Rorschach movement
The Republican leadership, such as it is, seems to have settled on a strategy of “repeal and replace” for healthcare reform and the coming election. I’m sorry to have to tell them, but even with gains in November, they won’t be able to overcome a veto. The best hope for repeal is if the incumbent president is defeated in 2012 and both the Senate and House are in Republican...
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“Not every President goes for the multipen signature, however. President George...”
– TIME (Always the pragmatist.)
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Alltock: Alltop Procrastinators Clock →
Runs somewhere between on-time and fifteen minutes fast to keep you from procrastinating. Since you dont know how fast its running, you better not cut things too close!
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The ultimate rap battle. →
The ultimate.
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On questioning motives
Why do [dermatologists] say that [you should avoid all sun exposure]?
They are heavily invested, I think, with the cosmetics industry. The American Academy of Dermatology just had their annual meeting in Miami Beach. It was huge. Many of the major cosmetic companies were there, and they were spending thousands of dollars just to be out there and promote their products to the...
Tumblr: Autism for the rest of us
The American Prospect has a great profile of Tumblr as a medium:
It’s this built-in community — a more formal linkage than most traditional blogs have — that leads to Tumblr’s focus on curation. According to Tumblr’s Web site, each month the average user creates 14 original posts, half of which are photos, and reblogs three. If you follow someone because you love her impeccable taste in vintage...
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NY Times: Take $787 Billion. Now Show Where It’s... →
I was quoted yesterday in this NY Times article about Edward Tufte joining the RAT Board:
Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at George Mason University, has been monitoring the stimulus at his site, stimuluswatch.org.
“What we want is the raw data. We don’t need a beautiful site,” Mr. Brito said.
In fact, he says that recovery.gov is too flashy and too crowded, and uses...
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The NYT's first draft of history on display
Today I e-mailed a link to a New York Times article (which will run tomorrow on the front page) about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s proposed budget cuts. I made a special point of copying and pasting the third paragraph, which read in its entirety:
Upending the priorities of his Democratic predecessors, Governor Christie unveiled a budget that would hit the poor, elderly,...
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Talk about incumbent lock-in
From a new Congress.org survey:
Since World War II, the number of seats in Congress occupied by former Congressional staffers has dramatically increased, with many in the positions once held by their former bosses.
In the current session of Congress alone, 75 one-time staffers are now Members, according to CQ’s Politics in America. Of this group, a survey by Congress.org found that over...
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WatchChinese girl freaks out people walking into a building.
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EarmarkData.org →
Happy Sunshine Week. This is a project a couple friends and I have organized to demand machine readable earmark data from Congress. Please check it out, sign the petition, and tell your friends!
Just give us the earmark data
Today is the first day of Sunshine Week and I want to tell you about a project Jim Harper, Gunnar Hellekson and I have organized called EarmarkData.org.
Congress recently changed its rules to require members to disclose their earmark requests online. Unfortunately, they don’t disclose these in any consistent way. You have to hunt for where each member has decided to place their...
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“[N]obody saw Jar Jar Binks coming.”
– Brilliantcrank
How to get free breast implant surgery
A grad student I’m working with is writing a paper about alternative financing. There are peer-to-peer lending services like Kiva and Prosper, then there are services that focus on equity. Alex Tabarrok recently linked to Thrust Fund, which allows students to finance their education by paying a share of their lifetime income to their investors.
I’m very interested in yet another...
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WatchI can finally explain to my parents what it is I do. I’m a bullshit expert.
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OK people, I know how much you want to reblog my Numa Numa Chatroulette video, so here is the link. And yes, Chatroulette Eye Vagina was a big inspiration.
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Cass Sunstein and other people's transparency
Cass Sunstein gave a talk at Brookings today about “the power of open government.” (Transcript here.) He stressed the key points of the administration’s Open Government Directive: transparency, collaboration, and participation. What I found interesting, though, is that all the examples he gave of open government were in fact examples of someone besides government being open.
He...
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Interdisciplinary survey of Chatroulette
The award for academic entrepreneurialism goes to Alex Leavitt & Tim Hwang who earlier this week release the paper “Chatroulette: An Initial Surey.” Conducted over two days, the study “sampled 201 ChatRoulette sessions, noting characteristics such as group size and gender.”
They find that Chatroulette is “a probabilistic community: a community shaped by a...
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http://heaven.internetarchaeology.org/ →
FACT: This will play in the iPad without Flash.
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