Tween girls go for pink ponies, Justin Bieber and Twilight.
Adult males in the STEM fields, not so much. For the most part.
Know your audience. Know why they come here (stories and analysis). Don't dumb it down IMO.
In trying to get more readers, make sure you don't lose what makes it attractive to the core audience. That means knowing what makes it attractive to the core audience.
How it's done is here. Basically, you test to see which of the various XMLHttpRequest objects work (basically it's several for Microsoft and one for the rest of the world), and use the one that works. I personally don't do it exactly that way, I use a try/catch block but that seems like a good answer too.
Details on the return values here.
It's quite straightforward. While there are good reasons to use jQuery, there's no need to use it solely to handle AJAX calls for multiple browsers.
If there must be change, there's something to be said for "incremental change."
Another factor perhaps? From The Economist magazine:
"That personality, along with intelligence, is at least partly heritable is becoming increasingly clear; so, presumably, the tendency to be happy or miserable is, to some extent, passed on through DNA. To try to establish just what that extent is, a group of scientists from University College, London; Harvard Medical School; the University of California, San Diego; and the University of Zurich examined over 1,000 pairs of twins from a huge study on the health of American adolescents.
The adolescents in Dr De Neve's study were asked to grade themselves from very satisfied to very dissatisfied. Dr De Neve found that those with one long allele were 8% more likely than those with none to describe themselves as very satisfied; those with two long alleles were 17% more likely.
Where the story could become controversial is when the ethnic origins of the volunteers are taken into account. All were Americans, but they were asked to classify themselves by race as well. On average, the Asian Americans in the sample had 0.69 long genes, the black Americans had 1.47 and the white Americans had 1.12."
But what's the benefit of capital punishment? Revenge? Justice? Deterrence? Closure?
Well, it certainly would have stopped these gentlemen:
There is a great bullshit test I came up with to give to someone who advocates capitol punishment. Ask them if our court system is 100% perfect in convicting the guilty. Then ask them if that means that means that we are murdering at least a few of the wrong people with capitol punishment. Then ask them if they would still feel that capitol punishment was fair and just if they were one of those people that was selected to die. Then ask them if they still support capitol punishment. If they say still yes, they are lying.
How about if the choice was being killed by a repeat murderer?
Or if the death penalty does deter, being killed by someone who wasn't deterred?
Getting rid of the death penalty is not a cost-free option.
Point of clarification: The financial crisis was caused by fraud and bad debt, not technology. The government actually did convene a quiet inquiry into the crisis (the FCIC - Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission) and results were found, but no action has been taken on it because it was (and continues to be) so very lucrative for many in the political-financial complex:
1) Conclusions of Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission - home page.
2) "We conclude this financial crisis was avoidable. The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire. The captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and failed to question, understand, and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public. Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble. While the business cycle cannot be repealed, a crisis of this magnitude need not have occurred. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the stars, but in us.
Despite the expressed view of many on Wall Street and in Washington that the crisis could not have been foreseen or avoided, there were warning signs. The tragedy was that they were ignored or discounted. There was an explosion in risky subprime lending and securitization, an unsustainable rise in housing prices, widespread reports of egregious and predatory lending practices, dramatic increases in household mortgage debt, and exponential growth in financial firms’ trading activities, unregulated derivatives, and short-term “repo” lending markets, among many other red flags. Yet there was pervasive permissiveness; little meaningful action was taken to quell the threats in a timely manner." -- From the summary document, page 3 actual, xvii in the document: Conclusions Of The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (PDF),
An amusing meme I've seen recently is attributing any standard of living improvement to the financial sector, instead of to the actual technology which causes the actual improvement.
Of Cows and Power Lines
Cattle seem to have an internal compass--one that's messed up by power lines
Posted 1 Jul 2009 | 4:00 GMT
IEEE Spectrum
A team of researchers from Germany and the Czech Republic has already discovered that, all factors being equal, cattle and two species of deer tend to align themselves along a north-south axis using some innate magnetic sense, and that this preferred alignment is disturbed when they graze under high-voltage power lines.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/of-cows-and-power-lines
It wasn't enough to merely fire him and his 5999 coworkers. They made an example out of him.
That's power.
1) Advertising will become more lucrative. The attempt to de-anonymize has dollars and cents reasons. It's the reason behind store discount cards. You use the card so the store can target coupons and advertising to you, getting you to spend more.
2) Dissent will become more difficult. It'll lead to less whistleblowing, less speaking truth to power and less honest discussion of unpopular ideas (because only popular ideas are good, right?).
3) There is the side effect of having less nastiness and vacuous idiocy. But it's not the only side effect. 2) above is also a side effect. However, less nastiness is merely a sales pitch, not a real discussion, as it ignores 2) above.
Follow the money, follow the power considerations. As always.
mc6809e wrote:
There's about 1.53 million more square km of ice than what is usual.Ol Olsoc wrote:
allow me to post the rest: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/
mc6809e noted that in the SOUTHERN hemisphere, there is a +1.53 million square km ice anomaly.
However, in the follow-on post, it shows that in the NORTHERN hemisphere, there is a -0.63 million square km ice anomaly.
So, +1.53 - 0.63 = +0.9 net global ice difference over the past 3 years. And this is relative to the mean from 1978-2008.
Personally, it does make sense to me that there is AGW, but these graphs indicate a net global sea ice increase over the past 3 years. Is it the last word in the discussion? No, but it is an interesting data point.
Pew Research report: "The Global Religious Landscape", with global numerical breakdowns.
If a virus cannot get into the Windows registry, it's not going to be able to be a persistent problem. The only way it can get into the registry AFAIK is via administrative prileges (or a privilege escalation exploit). Any simple file downloads will be blocked by the virus scanner. Obviously, keep the computer patched so that privilege escalation exploits are limited.
If a virus does get into the registry, the only way to be sure it's gone is to reset the computer. This pearl of wisdom comes from tedious experience.
Just give them a standard account on the computer, keep the administrator account password to yourself.
Also - it's very helpful to keep their computer behind a router which provides their WiFi. The router gets probed all day long and stays mute, and the nasties never get to strike up a conversation with the operating systems behind it.
In the long run what will make the drug companies more money.
The companies are merely vehicles for the people leading them. A cancer cure would make them wealthy beyond avarice, and allow those people a generational legacy. A cure would yield an immediate massive profit for the corporate leaders than would suppressing it.
It may destroy the company (exceedingly unlikely) but if destroying the company yielded a massive short term profit, lifting the company officers into the ranks of the ultra wealthy, the company would be beached on the rocks without a blink. The company is just a logical construct, a vehicle used to enrich the officers. Look at the financial sector. Wreckage of companies but massively enriched executives. Google Joseph Cassano and AIG to see an example.
This place just isn't big enough for all of us. We've got to find a way off this planet.
