• New Theory on Evolution of Poltical Beliefs | Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. Miller-McCune.
  (tags: goodmorningcmc)
• Antoine Dodson's Commercial For A Sex Offender Tracker App.
  (tags: goodmorningcmc)
• Worldometers - real time world statistics
  cool
  (tags: goodmorningcmc)
• Innocence Lost: Texas Monthly October 2010
  put in jail based on one witness's testimony in 1990, witness later loudly recanted testimony, only just released
  (tags: goodmorningcmc)
• For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance - Jeffrey Goldberg - National - The Atlantic
  I draw three lessons from this week's experience: The pat-down, while more effective than previous pat-downs, will not stop dedicated and clever terrorists from smuggling on board small weapons or explosives. When I served as a military policeman in an Israeli army prison, many of the prisoners "bangled" contraband up their asses. The second lesson is that the effectiveness of pat-downs does not matter very much, because the obvious goal of the TSA is to make the pat-down embarrassing enough for the average passenger that the vast majority of people will choose high-tech humiliation over the low-tech ball check. The third lesson remains constant: By the time terrorist plotters make it to the airport, it is, generally speaking, too late to stop them. If they are smart enough to make it to the airport without arrest, it is almost axiomatically true that they will be smart enough to figure out a way to bring weapons aboard a plane.

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• Hacker News | Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?
  (tags: charts chart startup)
• Rep. Hank Johnson: Guam could 'tip over and capsize'
  Like other islands, Guam is attached to the sea floor, which makes it extremely unlikely that it will tip over, even if there are lots and lots of people on it.
• "FarmVille" Interruption Cited in Baby's Murder
  A 22-year-old mother from Jacksonville, Florida, has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for shaking her 3-month-old son to death after his crying interrupted her FarmVille game.

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• BBC News - UK airlines back call for airport security changes
  Stop checking shoes, taking out laptops etc
• why netflix's recommendations are more interesting than amazon's - cdixon's posterous
  In the comments: "A last example: there are a couple dozen movies that accounted for a massive amount of error on the Netflix Prize (~15% of the remaining IIRC). Although it was termed the Napoleon Dynamite problem, the #1 movie for aggregate error in that data set was What Women Want. When the goal is the best customer experience, you could remove those items, stop recommending them to new users or just warn customers."
• All Programs Considered by Bill McKibben | The New York Review of Books
  National Public Radio’s flagship news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, featuring news and commentary alongside in-depth reports and stories that can stretch over twenty minutes—are the second- and third-most-popular radio programs in the country, each drawing about 13 million unique listeners in the course of the week. These NPR shows have far larger audiences than the news on cable television; indeed, all four television broadcast networks combined only draw twice as large an audience for their evening newscasts.
• Scale of Universe - Interactive Scale of the Universe Tool
  really cool, also lets you know how incapable your brain is of processing the size of things

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• Michelin Stars Draw Shots - WSJ.com
  Many Japanese chefs, especially in the Kansai region, say they never courted this attention. Even a single Michelin star can be seen as a curse by the Japanese: Their restaurants are for their customers. Why cook for a room full of strangers? Even worse: crass foreigners.
• The Happiness-Suicide Paradox
  The study concludes with the conjecture that people may find it particularly painful to be unhappy in a happy place, so that the decision to commit suicide is influenced by relative comparisons.
• Nerds Only: About AC Power on an Airplane - James Fallows - Technology - The Atlantic
  Providing enough power to every seat on an airplane would require heavy equipment.
• Digg: A Cautionary Tale for Web 2.0 Companies - Newsweek
  The big lesson of Digg may be simply this: if someone offers you a ridiculous amount of money for a company that wasn’t that hard to build, don’t think twice. Take the money and run.
• A successful Git branching model » nvie.com
  How to develop a software product using version control, helpful
• Hacker News | I constantly travel to Latin America, speaking at conferences and recruiting tal...
  to contact in the future
  (tags: latin america travel work south)
• What Google TV and Apple TV Should Do « blog maverick
  This isn’t Farmville vs Dancing with the Stars.  This is about the best alternative to boredom. If Google , Apple and their competitors can find simple games that are compelling to tens of millions of people and create a unique experience on your HDTV, they have a chance to start pulling people away from watching shows on TV.  You could actually see the number of hours spent watching TV decline materially.
• Eric Butler - Software Developer in Seattle WA
  Holy shit - GUI app lets you sit on open wireless networks, intercepts cookies, lets you instantly log in as the wireless user to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr Google accounts. Never ever ever ever open anything on an open wireless connection again, until they start using HTTPS and SSL for every connection
• Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you
  excellent observation - "My plans rarely work (unless they are boringly simple), but serendipity has been good to me, so over time I've tried to make the most of that. My theory of serendipity is still evolving, but from what I've seen, it's better to think in terms of "allowing" serendipity rather than "seeking" it or "creating" it. Opportunity is all around us, but we have beliefs and habits that block it."
• Out of line - The Boston Globe
  But psychologists who study status and power in social settings — and a growing number are — have found that human beings, in surprising ways, actually seem to thrive on a sense of social hierarchy, and rely on it. In certain settings, having a clear hierarchy makes us more comfortable, more productive, and happier, even when our own place in it is an inferior one. In one intriguing finding, NBA basketball teams on which large salary differentials separate the stars from the utility players actually play better and more selflessly than their more egalitarian rivals. “Status is such an important regulating force on people’s behavior, hierarchy solves so many problems of conflict and coordination in groups,” says Adam Galinsky, a psychologist at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who did the research on social hierarchies on basketball teams. “In order to perform effectively, you often need to have some pattern of deference.”
• Jaltcoh: 3 ways to deal with loneliness
  Become a hermit, celebrate your individuality, associate with some higher truth
• BBC News - Do typefaces really matter?
  good introduction to fonts - covers helvetica, times new roman, gill sans, psychology behind different fonts, difference between serif & sans serif

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• Bering in Mind: Being Suicidal: What it feels like to want to kill yourself
  covers baumeister's 6 steps to suicide. informative, disturbing
• More reasons to support congestion pricing:
  " we compare infants born to mothers living near toll plazas to infants born to mothers living near busy roadways but away from toll plazas with the idea that mothers living away from toll plazas did not experience significant reductions in local traffic congestion. We also examine differences in the health of infants born to the same mother, but who differ in terms of whether or not they were “exposed” to E-ZPass. We find that reductions in traffic congestion generated by E-ZPass reduced the incidence of prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 6.7-9.1% and 8.5-11.3% respectively, with larger effects for African-Americans, smokers, and those very close to toll plazas."

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• The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books
  charter schools aren't a magic bullet, teachers only responsible for ~10-20% of student gains. new teaching documentaries are not very accurate
• The Last Psychiatrist: The Military And PTSD: A Star Wars Guide
  The amount of perceived control affects total stress, not amount of actual control. Soldiers who think they are in more control have less psychological dropouts. Psych dropouts match physical casualties 1 for 1 in most armies

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• International Migration and Human Rights - Gordon Hanson - NBER paper
  The typical individual who migrates from a poor developing country to the United States sees an increase in income by a factor of four, largely as a result of the immense international differences in labor productivity that exist in the world today. As an illustrative example, I estimate that migration from Mexico to the United States raises global income by an amount equivalent to roughly one percent of US GDP.
• Intrade Prediction Markets - Will California's marijuana legislation pass?
  64% chance although low volume at the moment

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• The Facebook News Feed: How it Works,10 Biggest Secrets - The Daily Beast
  summary: you can't stalk your way into someone's news feed but if a lot of people are viewing your page you'll show up in many. sharing links more likely to get you in than sharing vanilla status updates. you won't show up in people's feeds if they have many many friends. new users don't show up in news feeds. commented posts show up in top feeds.
• Eye Tracking vs. Mouse Tracking | GazeHawk Blog
  whoops, this isn't good news
• Stop the Signature File Insanity. - NYTimes.com
  agreed, cut my signature from 7 to 2 lines in january: "If I put my edits into play, and add a soupçon of design, Blofeld could have something like this: Ernst Stavro Blofeld | Leader, Number 1 | SPECTRE +33 1 12 34 56 78 | @ernieblo | skype: meanguyspectre"

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• McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Small Talks.
  on a meta level, small talk sounds really pathetic... Buying Lunch at the Food Cart Customer: Weather joke! Server: Ha ha ha! Customer: Ha ha ha! Server: Weather complaint. Customer: Additional weather complaint. (Homeless man runs by wearing pants over head.) Customer: Job market joke! Server: Ha ha ha!

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