Nothingman's Blog About Nothing
If I Hate You More Than Myself We’ve Got A Problem
I like to think I’m an acquired taste, like old whiskey or arsenic in your tea
So this is usually the part where pretension comes out in full and beautiful force but this is going to be the first time in a long time I'm going to be honest. My name is Clarence (Hello), born in 1988, i got my undergrad degree in Sociology (with a concentration in Women's Studies) and I'm utterly terrified. I'm scared of everything, people, my own feelings and sometimes even being but really there's nothing much to be done about that despite what I say. And I will say a lot about how my life has no meaning and i want to die (which is the majority of the time) but sometimes it seems like life is worth living for and everything in it is a spectacular explosion of awe inspiring wonder (which is usually a three week span some time in March). If it seems odd to read think what it might be like living it. So to get off the topic of terror I prefer stories. I like to read them, I love to live in them and there is nothing better to me than a story so I guess this blog is a story mostly about me. Don't bother trying to find themes, connection or messages in what I post cause there really aren't any (unless they are completely accidental).
This blog is a story about what I find, what I feel and what I think so to that end I collect things to post or reblog. Its not meant to be anything truly meaningful or interconnected, just fun (mostly fun for me if you don't like it you can fuck right off) This is collection of all the the weird and interesting links from around the net that I find, comics, technology, comedy, current events, sociology, general geek/nerd interest, a little pornography and more weird stuff (seriously its become about 65% clusterfuck of the strange stuff which is also why I don't feel bad about continuing to name it Strange World). I think it makes for the closest representation to who I am that I've ever done and it just keeps growing bigger which is most of the fun. And don't be disturbed if i in several post warn about my soon to happen suicide (I have yet to actually do it so we're all probably safe for a few more years). Please feel free to talk to me and don't mind the depressive tone i will probably be using. I like to think I'm somewhat fun if also a complete idiot.
Please feel free to talk to me by letter in my ask or by following me on other social networks but please just throw me a message about who you are so I accept the request I have no patients for spamming (send me an ask here if you want to be a friend on Steam.
By the By it goes without saying you should make sure children don't read most of this (I like swearing and naked women of all shapes, colors and sizes).
You can Check me on Good Reads to Find out what I'm reading or send me Recommends
You can Also check me on Steam, I game a LOT (But its mostly solo RPGs)
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Lying next to her
She’s been this way for days
That bullet in her head
It’s better off this way
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Tumblr days of the week.
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Dumb white guy poses [via | girl version]
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G.G
same
Blister Sisters motto, duh
NASA technologist Jonathan Pellish believes the analog computing technology of yesteryear could potentially revolutionize everything from autonomous rendezvous and docking to remotely correcting wavefront errors on large, deployable space telescope mirrors like those to fly on the James Webb Space Telescope.
Gendered News
From entertainment to finance to politics to sports, the Guardian Datablog explores how women and men are published in leading UK news sources, and how often articles by gender are shared across social networks.
In the interactive they’ve produced, you can sort across different criteria as well as drill deeper into specific publications and their sections.
At a macro level, UK news publishing is much like what we see in the United States: it’s dominated by men with less than 30% of news articles published by women across the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Guardian.
Drill down a bit, or look at gender participation by subject area, and you see women dominating topics like “lifestyle” and “entertainment” and men dominating, well, most everything else.
But the Datablog isn’t just looking at who gets published, but who gets heard.
You would think it’s one and the same but with the decline of the newspaper front page — and the Web site home page — as a conversation driver, it’s the social ecosystem of readers and their sharing habits that drives audience engagement and interaction.
Via the Guardian:
Online, who gets heard is determined by an ecosystem of actors: individuals sharing on Facebook and Twitter, link-sharing communities, personal algorithms on Google News, and citizen media curators. Newspapers only offer part of the information supply; we readers decide who’s heard every time we click, share or use our own voice…
…Of course, the reach of an article is much more complicated than likes and shares. What gets seen is often dependent on the time of day and the influence of who shares a link.
The definition of likes and shares also changes. Since our measurements in early August, Facebook’s counters have been changed to track links sent within private messages. This year, newsrooms experimented with Facebook social readers and tablet apps to grow their audiences. Bernhard Rieder’s network diagram of the Guardian’s Facebook page illustrates yet another social channel for news. Publishers sometimes can’t agree on what their own data means.
Despite these limitations, data on likes and shares offer the best outside picture of audience interest in women’s writing in the news.
Read through for analysis and more about the methodology and tools used to suss out the data. As usual, the Guardian also lets you download the data so you can work with it yourself.
Image: Screenshot, UK News Gender Ranking: What They Publish vs What Readers Share, via The Guardian. Select to embiggen.
As Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones prove, good music lasts a long time; now Japanese hi-tech giant Hitachi says it can last even longer — a few hundred million years at least.
The company on Monday unveiled a method of storing digital information on slivers of quartz glass that can endure extreme temperatures and hostile conditions without degrading, almost forever.
And for anyone who updated their LP collection onto CD, only to find they then needed to get it all on MP3, a technology that never needs to change might sound appealing.
Brewster Kahle, founder, Internet Archive, to the New York Times. All the TV News Since 2009, on One Web Site.
The News: Archive.org has recorded every news program from 20 US news sources since 2009. Today they release 350,000 broadcasts to the world. You can start your remixing here.
(via futurejournalismproject)
Map of the underwater Internet
We love maps which show the infrastructure behind the internet. This map by Nicolas Rapp for Fortune Magazine shows the underwater cables which connect the internet globally. Check out more of the maps from this project.
Paul Higgins: That is just fantastic
and it reminds me of the story about the turkey by Nassim Taleb. All the available evidence the turkey has is that humans are a benevolent and caring species that houses and feeds turkey until one day ……….
(via Facebook Changes – Everybody Panic! — TweetFindTV)
So true: WE are the content of Facebook the broadcaster- it’s free but they sell our information!!
Things You Can Do That You Never Used To
Via Archive.org:
For over a decade, CNN (Cable News Network) has been providing transcripts of shows, events and newscasts from its broadcasts. The archive has been maintained and the text transcripts have been dependably available at transcripts.cnn.com. This is a just-in-case grab of the years of transcripts for later study and historical research.
So if you can’t get enough of whatever it is they’re trying to do in the Situation Room, a one gig tarball of text is waiting for your download.
H/T: Flowing Data
Finding a digital poverty line
According to a new study by American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, there is a new (or at least under-thought) difference between the rich and the poor in the United States.
Having analyzed data from all fifty states and D.C., the group shows that areas with relatively low household incomes have low broadband subscription percentages, too. No duh, you say? Well, read on to the implications:
Access to broadband has become critical for anyone to keep up in American society. Finding and applying for jobs often takes place entirely online. Students receive assignments via email. Basic government services are routinely offered online.
The lack of a broadband connection puts people at a profound disadvantage.
According to the article, which drew information from data collected circa 2008-2010, wealthier households subscribe to broadband at a rate of 80% to 100%, while lower income homes are closer to 40% to 60%.
A broadband connection, which clocks in at or above 96 kb/s while downloading, is most widely purchased in the country’s wealthy Northeast (and Hawaii, but they think it may be all the vacation homes), with Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, Connecticut being the country’s most heavily subscribed metro area.
The states with the lowest subscription rates by household are, from the bottom, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Oklahoma. Of those, Mississippi holds the title of both poorest state and least connected, with a median household income of $36,850 and only 38 broadband subscriptions per 100 households.
By household income, Arkansas, Tennessee and West Virginia follow directly behind it, according to the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
FJP: Is it just a coincidence? Probably not…
It’s not a rural problem, they say — Alaska’s subscriptions have gone up 15% recently. Montana and South Dakota have also gone up. The West, too, showed rapid growth through 2010. This contrasts with the South, which the report singles out as the least prosperous, least connected region in the country.
Furthermore, when looking Bridgeport, CT, the group found their “poverty divide” looked like a rainbow from the city center to its outer suburbs. Using an interactive map created by the workshop, anyone can see their community’s broadband use, and Bridgeport’s is probably the most damning:
The Bridgeport MSA also ranks No. 1 when it comes to the unequal distribution of wealth, according to a Stanford University study that looked at income segregation in American cities.
That gap is reflected in the broadband map. The urban core of the city suffers from biting poverty and low rates of broadband subscribership, while the outer suburbs show sky-high incomes and correspondingly high rates of broadband subscribership.
The report also confronts why poor areas don’t have fast internet, and the answer is perhaps all too obvious — it’s too expensive.
But there are a few more considerations, too:
There are cultural issues. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to subscribe. Whites subscribe at higher rates than blacks and Hispanics. And senior citizens subscribe at lower rates than young people.
That doesn’t mean the poor or less fortunate don’t find a way online, though. Take the country’s least connected metro area — McAllen, Texas, which is just five miles from Mexico. The report states:
In McAllen, the library is often where people go to connect. “Our computer lab and free Internet services are probably the largest draw into the building, said Jose A. Gamez, director of McAllen’s public libraries. “We’re adding about 50 more computers because of the demand.”
The low home-subscription rate in the city is no mystery. ”Hidalgo County is one of the poorest counties in the country so a lot of people here just can’t afford their own computers or the broadband connection,” he said.
And for the record, Maine fell 2% recently. Wonder why?
There’s always something brewing in the PopTech community. From the world-changing people, projects and ideas in our network, a handful of this week’s highlights follows.
- 2011 Social Innovation Fellow Jake Porway’s Data Without Borders brings data scientists and social organizations together to design transformative visualizations and decision-making tools. Yesterday, the White House recognized Data Without Borders in their “Big Data Research and Development Initiative” announcement.
- 2009 PopTech Fellow Jason Aramburu launched re:char in 2005 to develop low-cost technologies that fight climate change while improving the quality of degraded soils. re:char’s systems convert agricultural waste into renewable fuel and into biochar, sequestering atmospheric carbon and improving soil quality. Previously focused on bring biochar to developing countries, Aramburu is expanding his work stateside with aKickstarter campaign to kick off a trial to evaluate the effectiveness of biochar for domestic farmers and gardeners.
- Eli Pariser (PopTech 2010) is an expert on the social and political impact of the personalized web and how (and what kind of) information spreads. Earlier this week, Pariser, along with The Onion‘s Peter Koechley and Facebook’s Chris Hughes launched Upworthy, a new project that hopes to help people “find important content that is as fun to share as a FAIL video of some idiot surfing off his roof.”
- Finally, some lighthearted Friday fun. OK Go (PopTech 2010) has teamed up with College Humor to announce OKGopid, the world’s most fun and least successful dating site. In music news, OK Go released a rainbow of tango, or what you might call a music video for the song “Skyscrapers” yesterday. Have a great weekend!
If you’d like to receive a stream of these updates (and more) throughout the week in real time, follow us on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the PopTech blog.
Image: OK Go
“During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to “create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.” Last week, President Obama fulfilled that promise with the rollout of Ethics.gov, which “brings records and data from across the federal government to one central location, making it easier for citizens to hold public officials accountable.”
Ethics.gov is available to the public and allows anyone to access and search the records of seven different databases:
• White House Visitor Records;
• Office of Government Ethics Travel Reports;
• Lobbying Disclosure Act Data;
• Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Act Data;
• Federal Election Commission Individual Contribution Reports;
• Federal Election Commission Candidate Reports; and
• Federal Election Commission Committee Reports.
According to a White House press release, the database includes millions of White House visitor records, records for entities registered with the Federal Election Commission such as PACs, records for each candidate who has either registered with the FEC or appeared on a ballot list prepared by a state elections office, lobbying registrations, and much more.
On his Sunlight Foundation blog, John Wonderlich, who is Policy Director for the Sunlight Foundation and an advocate for open government, wrote that while Ethics.gov fulfilled the president’s pledge, “neither money and politics research nor executive branch oversight are going to be revolutionized by this search page — at least not yet.” He added that while it will not happen immediately, the site could become a primary destination for investigative journalists or ethics officials.”
Scientists needed $3 billion and 13 years to sequence the three billion base pairs encoded in a single human genome—the first time. By 2011, eight years after that first project was completed, the cost of sequencing a human genome had fallen to $5,000, in a process that took just a few weeks. And in January, Jonathan Rothberg, a chemical engineer and the founder of the biotech company Ion Torrent, unveiled an approach that is faster and cheaper still. He says his machine will be able to sequence a human genome, some 3.2 gigabytes’ worth of data, in two hours for just $1,000. Now thousands, and soon enough millions, of patients will have their genetic makeup laid bare, which presents an entirely new problem: How to analyze all that information?
» via infoneer-pulse: Popular Science
(via emergentfutures)
The problem of course is that the “power” of big data to help answer challenging questions relies upon the quality of that underlying data. And by “quality,” I don’t simply mean whether the data is accurate (which we will see is a fraught term in itself), but instead I am concerned with what sorts of assumptions are present in the collection of that data, what’s being left out, and how does the process of data collection influence the results?
What I am trying to demonstrate is that data, like science, is not as purely objective as we typically think it is. By assuming the objectivity of the underlying data, we set ourselves up to make large-scale decisions without properly challenging them because they are based on data, and that data “can’t be wrong”. The solution however is not to rid the data of all subjective intrusions because at a certain point this is not possible. What I am advocating is to approach big data with a healthy skepticism and an awareness of the ways in which it is lacking or only presenting a part of the picture.
Massive, crucial point, beautifully expressed - and by an undergrad no less (by name of Evan Freedman).
Comment on The Limits of Big Data by Klint Finley on RWW, June 2011
(via hautepop)
(via zeezeescorner)
Data as Art: Textured Brain
The brain is a monotone mass of neurons that is often difficult to pick apart, even on a dissection table. Yet through a technique called diffusion MRI, which measures the spread of water molecules through neural tissue, researchers can add revealing color to the maze of connections.
Ultra-strong magnetic fields on the order of 7 teslas (about 1,400 times stronger than a refrigerator magnet) manipulate the water molecules along tracks of white matter neurons, breaking the movement into three basic directions.
Left–right tracks of neural tissue are represented by red, front–back tracks by green and top–bottom tracks by blue. Each track winds around in a specific way, lending it a unique color. Functional clusters of white matter emerge as colored regions. “It’s a smart way to transform something so complex into something simple and immediately comprehensible,” Margulies says of the diffusion MRI technique.
(via scinerds)
New Hunch data looks at the demographic and psychographic differences between iPhone and Android users.
(via psychology2010)
