08 April 10 - 17:13The Astonishing Voice of Albert Hirschman
The Astonishing Voice of Albert Hirschman
"The subtitle of the book is "Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States." Hirschman's concern is with "repairable lapses" in organizational performance: declines that could be corrected with the right balance of information, incentives and flexibility of response. This is not a subject to which economists had paid much attention, and he begins by asking why"
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21 March 10 - 15:01Why writing software is not like engineering
Writing software is most similar to writing fiction novels. Writing novels is also an act of creation in an unconstrained and ethereal medium with few well-established construction rules. We know good writing when we see it, but it is hard to teach. Experience writing and feedback from better writers (coders) is the most reliable means of becoming a good writer (coder). Without a well understood process, software will remain more an art than a science. The term "software engineering" is more a goal than how we actually write software.
http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~parrt/doc/software-not-engineering.html
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15 February 10 - 12:18The Global Climate Change debate really explained
Perfect
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03 February 10 - 04:40Darpa's New Plans: Crowdsource Intel, Edit DNA
"The Pentagon's science agency has big plans for next year: crowdsourcing military intelligence, creating an "immune system" for Defense Department networks, and even research that might one day lead to editing a soldier's DNA."
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/darpas-new-plans-crowdsource-intel-immunize-nets-edit-dna/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A wired%2Findex %28Wired%3A Index 3 %28Top Stories 2%29%29&utm_content=Google Feedfetcher
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05 January 10 - 17:10Australia To Enforce Mandatory Chinese-Style Internet Censorship
The Australian government is set to impose Chinese-style Internet censorship by enforcing a universal national filter that will block websites deemed controversial, as part of a wider agenda to regulate the Internet according to free speech advocates.
http://afteramerica.wordpress.com/2010/01/03/australia-to-enforce-mandatory-chinese-style-internet-censorship/
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04 January 10 - 15:48Group That Shaped Death Penalty Gives Up on Its Own Work
Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/us/05bar.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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23 December 09 - 22:46Roko Mijic at Good.is: The Utopia Force
"If we consider all the possible ways that the universe could be arranged, and rank them in terms of how good they would be, Banks’ utopia certainly gets a very high rank. But it seems unlikely that it is the very best—or even close to the best. Banks’ utopia represents the limit of good experiences that we can currently think of and realize are good according to our complex values. Just how much better could it get?"
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/12/roko-mijic-at-goodis-the-utopia-force/
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16 December 09 - 10:47Would cutting the minimum wage raise employment?
"..the belief that lower wages would raise overall employment rests on a fallacy of composition. In reality, reducing wages would at best do nothing for employment; more likely it would actually be contractionary."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/would-cutting-the-minimum-wage-raise-employment/
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