Patri Friedman makes waves with 'seasteading' plan. Milton Friedman's grandson Patri has a vision that might have made the economist proud: to build a floating libertarian nation 12 miles off the coast of California. Billed as "Burning Man meets Silicon Valley meets the water," the planned nation flotilla would be constructed on a variety of barges and water platforms within sight of San Francisco.
It would include everything from homes, schools and hospitals to bikes for transportation and aqua farms for food. Despite the widespread skepticism that the project is bound to invite, Friedman already has secured more than $2 million in venture capital for the development, which strives to create a free-market society in which members are free to form their own governing structures. "We can't experiment here because all the land is claimed - the only place left is the ocean," says Friedman, 35, a former Google engineer now working for the "seasteading" movement full-time. 'Ridiculous' premises Those in academic circles have balked.
Short logic (Groupon IPO: Pass on this deal) Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. (简体字：为什么中文这么TM难？) (繁體字：為什麼中文這麼TM難？) The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom? " A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. If this were as far as I went, my statement would be a pretty empty one. If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Everyone's heard the supposed fact that if you take the English idiom "It's Greek to me" and search for equivalent idioms in all the world's languages to arrive at a consensus as to which language is the hardest, the results of such a linguistic survey is that Chinese easily wins as the canonical incomprehensible language.
There is truth in this linguistic yarn; Chinese does deserve its reputation for heartbreaking difficulty. Okay, having explained a bit of what I mean by the word, I return to my original question: Why is Chinese so damn hard? 1. Beautiful, complex, mysterious -- but ridiculous. 2. 3. 4. What was going on here? 5. 6. Forget it. The Future Has Thicker Tails than the Past: Model Error as Branching Counterfactuals by Nassim Taleb. New York University-Poly School of EngineeringMay 23, 2011 NYU Poly Research Paper Abstract: Ex ante predicted outcomes should be interpreted as counterfactuals (potential histories), with errors as the spread between outcomes.
But error rates have error rates. We reapply measurements of uncertainty about the estimation errors of the estimation errors of an estimation treated as branching counterfactuals. Such recursions of epistemic uncertainty have markedly different distributial properties from conventional sampling error, and lead to fatter tails in the projections than in past realizations.
Counterfactuals of error rates always lead to fat tails, regardless of the probability distribution used. Number of Pages in PDF File: 11 working papers series. Re-Engineering Journalism « Knight Garage. 6 ways journalists can use Quora as tool to report, share ideas. Quora, the fast-growing question and answer site, has become increasingly popular among journalists. In a phone interview, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo attributed the site’s recent growth to an increase in media coverage and traffic from Twitter, among other factors. Because the site auto-follows users’ Facebook and Twitter accounts, it makes sense that its user-base would spread quickly once a few influencers begin using it. “Originally when we built the site, we didn’t have new users automatically follow all their Twitter contacts,” said D’Angelo, former CTO of Facebook. “But since, in the vast majority of cases, people want to see what their friends are doing on the site, we changed it to automatically follow the people who we can detect that they care about via Twitter/Facebook.
This helps growth a bit but it actually wasn’t the reason why we did it.” Quora has some work to do as it looks for ways to maintain high quality questions and answers. Find story ideas, sources. Fast and Easy is the beginning of the end of social media 1.0 - Syndicating Brian Solis. I Adopted a Scorched Earth Policy, Closed 2 Blogs & Jumped to Tumblr. In military circles, a ‘scorched earth policy’ – according to Wikipedia – is “A strategy which involves destroying anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through, or withdrawing from, a given theater of operations.” Perhaps it’s symbolic, but that’s exactly the approach I took to my digital presence this past Memorial Day weekend. I started a fresh new site on the future of media over on Tumblr.
Then I promptly turned around and slashed both my TypePad-powered blog, which I ran from 2004 to 2009, and my Posterous blog, which I started with some fanfare back in 2009. With just two clicks of a mouse I rid the web of literally thousands of blog posts, some of which I am proud of – others less so – and redirected the URLs to the new site. Now before you write off this decision off as simply a mid-life crisis, let me explain why I did so. I fundamentally believe that we are entering the next great era of the web – The Validation Era. These four media spheres include: Greylock Partners launches new $160 million tech fund for Europe and Israel.
Well known US VC house Greylock Partners is launching a brand new $160 million fund aimed at internet technology companies, with the fund being deployed between Europe and Israel. Greylock is best known for its stakes in Facebook, Groupon and LinkedIn and European investments including Wonga. Greylock’s move will be a shot in the arm for European tech companies looking for more options when raising financing.
We’ve confirmed that the fund will be represented in London by Laurel Bowden, a Partner, and will cover investments from early stage and beyond. [Correction: The fund was raised by Greylock Partners' affiliate fund, Greylock Israel Partners. In the US Greylock invests in seed stage companies through its Greylock Discovery Fund, early stage companies through Greylock XIII and late stage companies through Greylock Growth. [Update: We've now confirmed with Greylock that this is Fund II for Europe/Israel. Why some investors vow to NEVER buy stocks again -- The Buzz - Jun. 1.
According to a survey of more than 1,000 Americans by Prudential Financial, many have grown increasingly distrustful of the stock market. NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Want to know what the hot new trend in investing apparently is? Not investing. Even though the S&P 500 (SPX) has more than doubled from its March 2009 bear market lows, many investors still don't trust the rally according to a survey from Prudential Financial. Prudential (PRU, Fortune 500), which polled more than 1,000 investors between the ages of 35 and 70 online earlier this year, found that 58% of those surveyed have lost faith in the stock market.
Even more alarming, 44% said they plan to never invest in stocks. Ever. Never is a long time. But it's a really bad idea for anybody who's still relatively young and healthy to treat the market the way that Tony Soprano did his mother. What are you going to do for the next 25 to 30 years if you're 40? I get it. But what's the solution? Stocks are inherently risky. And guess what? Right Tools Can Unleash iPad’s Creativity. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times The Camera Connection Kit for the iPad. But with the right tools — and the ability to control the urge to play one last game of Angry Birds — the iPad can also be a hefty workhorse. Inexpensive apps and third-party peripherals make the iPad an excellent device for photographers, artists, writers and bloggers to create original content.
(It can still help those forced to do more mundane tasks.) Photography Although the iPad 2 comes with a front- and rear-facing camera, the quality of the images it can capture is so low that it sometimes looks as if they were taken with a disposable camera. To do so, you will need the iPad Camera Connection Kit, available from Apple for $30. Although iPad-specific photo editing apps are still trickling into the iTunes App Store, a few considerable options are available for download. Adobe Photoshop Express, which is free, will let you change the contrast, saturation and brightness of an image. Painting and Drawing. Indian IT firms: Another giant leap. First Observation Of 8 Entangled Photons Smashes Entanglement Record Entanglement is the strange quantum phenomenon in which objects become so closely linked that they share the same existence. In the language of physics, they are described by the same wavefunction.
Entangling things isn’t so difficult really. Most interactions involve entanglement of one sort or another. The trouble is pinning it down. In recent years, physicists have learnt how to entangle all kinds of objects in pairs–photons, electrons, atoms and so on. Today, however, Xing-Can Yao and buddies at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, say they’ve smashed this record by entangling 8 photons, then manipulating and observing them all simultaneously. That’s no easy feat.
The trick is to first send a high energy photon through a nonlinear crystal that converts it into two entangled but lower energy photons. This pair is, of course, entangled with photon A. The trouble with this process is that it results in a very weak beam. That’s significant. How to use a semicolon. Intel's Cool—or Creepy—Museum of Me - Wall Street Journal (blog) | Movin' Ahead. Linkedin, Google, lastminute.com – a nostalgic trip down IPO lane | innovatrs.com. Leveraging Infographics to Improve Your SEO Rankings | 3dcart Shopping Cart Software Blog.
Ecommerce merchants are constantly looking for new and creative ways to promote their online stores, and by now most have realized the value of running a blog to attract visitors to their site in the hopes of converting them into paying customers. There are a number of different blog techniques that merchants utilize to gain traffic and improve organic rankings, such as writing product reviews, top ten lists, contest promotions, or customer question and answer segments. However, very few ecommerce merchants are leveraging infographics as a regular component of their search engine optimization strategy, and this is an area that they could consider experimenting more often. Infographics have great potential to give them a leg up over their competition.
Below are some tips and ideas about how you can integrate infographics into your SEO efforts. This plan will allow you to gain more back links to your ecommerce store, which in turn could help you rank better for your target keywords. 1. 2. How Rackspace Beats the Behemoths. At a former mall in San Antonio, near escalators that used to shuttle Mervyns shoppers between floors, Rackspace Hosting (RAX) Chairman Graham Weston explains a phrase his 3,500 employees have practically tattooed to their brains: "fanatical support. " That's how Weston sees Rackspace beating larger, better-known competitors such as Amazon.com (AMZN) in the business of hosting others' websites and applications on servers around the world.
The 12-year-old company had a decade of near-death experiences, including a disastrous initial public offering during the 2008 financial crisis. (Its stock fell almost 20 percent on the first day of trading.) Since 2007, Rackspace's sales have grown by an average of 30 percent every year, and analysts expect net income to climb 49 percent this year, to almost $70 million. Wall Street has caught on: Rackspace shares, up almost tenfold since early 2009, are trading near an all-time high of $46 per share, valuing the company at more than $5.6 billion. The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos. Update: Dan has a follow up to this post, here. This guest post was written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and lead TA for the Stanford Facebook Class. Dan will graduate from the Stanford Management Science & Engineering Masters program in June.
Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine. When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy – videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. – videos with millions and millions of views.
Secret #1: Not all viral videos are what they seem 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.