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The offending syllable is right in the titles of two of the songs, deployed as an imperative by Cee Lo Green and as an adverbial participle by Pink. Mr. Green’s song was nominated for a Grammy Award, where its televised listing was coyly phrased, “The Song Also Known as ‘Forget You.’ ” Pink’s song, a self-help power ballad assuring insecure people that they don’t have to be (emphatically) perfect, also has a cuss-free version. There’s an airplay-ready variant of Enrique Iglesias’s hardcore hit discreetly titled “Tonight (I’m Lovin’ You).” But it’s the bluntness of his original chorus — which is prefaced by Mr. Iglesias singing, “I don’t mean to be rude” — that got the song noticed in the first place.
Of course he means to be rude! Pop songs fight to be noticed in an arms race of sentiments, gimmicks, sonic manipulation and promotional strategies. For Mr. Iglesias, trading pop’s usual affectionate euphemism for the bluntly physical verb couldn’t be more calculated; as a pop lover-boy, Mr. Iglesias decided that the crudity would turn on more fans than it would drive away. It’s a cheap shot that worked. (He has also released a video clip set in a strip club, complete with topless women in a cage.)
via From Cee Lo Green to Pink, Speaking the Unspeakable – NYTimes.com.

March 22, 2011, 9:02 am
Work of Depressions Watch
Mark Thoma leads us to new research from the San Francisco Fed showing that recent college graduates have experienced a large rise in unemployment and sharp fall in full-time employment, coupled with a decline in wages. Why is this significant?
The answer is that it’s one more nail in the coffin of the notion that employment is depressed because we have the wrong kind of workers, or maybe workers in the wrong place.
In some ways I think framing the discussion in terms of “structural unemployment” isn’t helpful. It may be better to say that a number of influential people want us to believe that Great Recession is serving some useful purpose — that the economy is “recalculating”, that it’s getting carpenters out of Nevada to jobs where they’re needed, etc.. It’s the same idea that Schumpeter pushed in the now-infamous passage in which he opposed any attempt to mitigate the Great Depression, even through monetary policy:
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The right question to ask, with regard to all such arguments, is, where are the scarcities? If we have the wrong kind of workers, then the right kind of workers must be in high demand, and either be in short supply or have rapidly rising wages. So where are these people? If the problem is lack of skill, then highly skilled workers — such as recent college graduates — should be doing well. If the problem is too many carpenters in Nevada, then non-carpenters somewhere else must be doing well. Who? Where?
Well, if there are such people, they’re doing a very good job of hiding.
This is a demand-side slump; the evidence is grossly inconsistent with any other story.
via Work of Depressions Watch – NYTimes.com.

“In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%,” Dr Wiener said.
The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the “non-religious” category.
They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them.
And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.
via BBC News – Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says.

The title of this lecture, “An Apology for Roger Ebert,” may require a bit of clarification.
I’m not here to offer an apology in the sense of regret for anything done wrong.
This is an apology in the sense of a Greek apologia, the systematic defense of a position or opinion.
It’s a defense of Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times who, a little over five years ago, annoyed our industry by declaring that “video games can never be art.”
For those few of you unacquainted with this controversy, I’ll spend just a few minutes recounting what happened.
via GameSetWatch – Opinion: Brian Moriarty’s Apology For Roger Ebert.

Would love to try coding with these libraries this weekend.

A Sample of 20 JavaScript Libraries for Data Visualization
By Alex Williams / March 19, 2011 2:00 PM / 2 Comments
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This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware.
Timeseries of English monarchs I am a sucker for data visualization. I am less enamored with infographics these days as I have noticed some hijacking of the medium for public relations stunts. Taking a few anecdotes and drawing some arrows does not cut it in my book.
 
I did find this excellent post this morning by Jacob Gube on Six Revisions that gives an overview of 20 JavaScript libraries.
Gube says the JavaScript libraries “turn boring numerical data into beautiful, interactive and informative visualizations.” I can agree with that.
Here are five libraries that I picked out from Gube’s post:
via A Sample of 20 JavaScript Libraries for Data Visualization – ReadWriteCloud.