Reporting tips: Anthony Shadid |

More tips on the blog post. RIP Anthony Shadid.

Shadid was deeply convicted of the importance of his work.
On nytimes.com, Hicks writes:
“The risks in Syria were very high, but we took them with great planning and caution, believing it was worth it to tell the story of this massacre. He was full of vigor and inspiration in our week of reporting, saying endlessly that he could not wait to start writing.
The end came suddenly, on our way out of Syria toward Turkey. He did not suffer. He died peacefully, doing what he believed in.”
There are as many reasons to leave journalism as there are news organizations. And not everyone should be a journalist. But if you choose this profession, make sure you’re passionate about it. That passion will carry you through and propel you toward exhilarating stories that, ultimately, will help make our world a better place.
via Reporting tips: Anthony Shadid |.

rePost::8 Rules For Creating A Passionate Work Culture | Fast Company

8. Take the long view
If your culture is dependent on this quarter’s earnings or this month’s sales targets, then it is handicapped by short-term thinking. Passion capitalists take the long view. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in five years. The culture needs to look ahead, not just in months but in years and even decades.
The writer Arthur Koestler said that a writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years’ time. Lasting influence is better than a burst of fame. Keep an eye on the long view.
via 8 Rules For Creating A Passionate Work Culture | Fast Company.

rePost::How Religions Demand for Obedience Keeps Us in the Dark Ages | Daylight Atheism | Big Think

That most of the Kashrut laws are divine ordinances without reason given is 100 per cent the point. It is very easy not to murder people. Very easy. It is a little bit harder not to steal because one is tempted occasionally. So that is no great proof that I believe in God or am fulfilling His will. But, if He tells me not to have a cup of coffee with milk in it with my mincemeat and peas at lunchtime, that is a test. The only reason I am doing that is because I have been told to so do. It is something difficult.In other words, the kosher laws have no reason or justification, and thats a good thing, because they teach people the habit of unquestioning obedience, which should be encouraged. This uncannily resembles a piece of parenting advice from Stephen Colbert, who satirically wrote that “Arbitrary rules teach kids discipline: If every rule made sense, they wouldnt be learning respect for authority, theyd be learning logic”. Religious authorities like this rabbi are making the exact same argument in all seriousness! And then, of course, theres Islam, whose very name is Arabic for “submission”.
via How Religions Demand for Obedience Keeps Us in the Dark Ages | Daylight Atheism | Big Think.

Hobbs, NM, picked as site of scientific ghost town – Boston.com

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—A scientific ghost town in the heart of southeastern New Mexico oil and gas country will hum with the latest next-generation technology — but no people.
A $1 billion city without residents will be developed in Lea County near Hobbs, officials said Tuesday, to help researchers test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets.
Hobbs Mayor Sam Cobb said the unique research facility that looks like an empty city will be a key for diversifying the economy of the nearby community, which after the oil bust of the 1980s saw bumper stickers asking the last person to leave to turn out the lights.
“It brings so many great opportunities and puts us on a world stage,” Cobb told The Associated Press before the announcement.
Pegasus Holdings and its New Mexico subsidiary, CITE Development, said Hobbs and Lea County beat out Las Cruces, for the Center for Innovation, Technology and Testing.
The CITE project is being billed as a first-of-its kind smart city, or ghost town of sorts, that will be developed on about 15 square miles west of Hobbs.
via Hobbs, NM, picked as site of scientific ghost town – Boston.com.

 
 

The Day Programmer vs. The Night Programmer « notgartner

Now – day programmers are the most prevalent in this industry, and you find them mostly in organisations which have historically tolerated a certain amount of inefficiency. Day programmers have the following characteristics:
1. They are mostly led and seldom lead.
2. The have trouble coping with complexity.
3. They cannot visualise a solution.
4. They don’t load their development tools at home.
5. Typically don’t participate in the development community.
6. See programming as “just a job”.
via The Day Programmer vs. The Night Programmer « notgartner.

Warren Buffett Is A Punk | TechCrunch

I don’t think Buffett is a bad guy. I don’t know him. I have no personal opinion of him. But he’s not your grandfather. Like any hard-core investor, he’d slit your throat in a dark alley before letting you make a dime of profit off of him.My main point is: always look at agendas. Try to understand the real reasons behind someone’s “good reasons”. And yes, I know there will be comments like “blah blah Buffett is 1000x the investor and man you are.” He probably is. I’m probably a worse punk thank he is. But I admit it. Also, before anyone brings it up: why is this on TechCrunch? Buffett has long commented that “tech is too complicated for me to invest in” and yet now he is one of the largest tech investors on the planet with his investments in IBM, INTC, and DTV. When someone who is so good at crafting agendas turns his eye towards you, you better keep your hands on your wallet.
via Warren Buffett Is A Punk | TechCrunch.

Erik Naggum's XML rant

| And how would you improve on it?
A brief summary, then: Remove the syntactic mess that is attributes.
(You will then find that you do not need them at all.) Enclose the
/element/ in matching delimiters, not the tag. These simple things
makes people think differently about how they use the language.
Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people
optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves
differently with different syntaxes. Next, introduce macros that
look exactly like elements, but that are expanded in place between
the reader and the “object model”. Then, remove the obnoxious
character entities and escape special characters with a single
character, like \, and name other entities with letters following
the same character. If you need a rich set of publishing symbols,
discover Unicode. Finally, introduce a language for micro-parsers
than can take more convenient syntaxes for commonly used elements
with complex structure and make them /return/ element structures
more suitable for processing on the receiving end, and which would
also make validation something useful. The overly simple regular
expression look-alike was a good idea when processing was expensive
and made all decisions at the start-tag, but with a DOM and less
stream-like processing, a much better language should be specified
that could also do serious computation before validating a document
— so that once again processing could become cheaper because of the
“markup”, not more expensive because of it.
But the one thing I would change the most from a markup language
suitable for marking up the incidental instruction to a type-setter
to the data representation language suitable for the “market” that
XML wants, is to go for a binary representation. The reasons for
/not/ going binary when SGML competed with ODA have been reversed:
When information should survive changes in the software, it was an
important decision to make the data format verbose enough that it
was easy to implement a processor for it and that processors could
liberally accept what other processors conservatively produced, but
now that the data formats that employ XML are so easily changed
that the software can no longer keep up with it, we need to slam on
the breaks and tell the redefiners to curb their enthusiasm, get it
right before they share their experiments with the world, and show
some respect for their users. One way to do that is to increase the
cost of changes to implementations without sacrificing readability
and without making the data format more “brittle”, by going binary.
Our information infrastructure has become so much better that the
nature of optimization for survivability has changed qualitatively.
The question of what we humans need to read and write no longer has
any bearing on what the computers need to work with. One of the
most heinous crimes against computing machinery is therefore to
force them to parse XML when all they want is the binary data. As
an example, think of the Internet Protocol and Transmission Control
Protocol in XML terms. Implementors of SNMP regularly complained
that parsing the ASN.1 encodings took a disproportionate amount of
processing time, but they also acknowledged that properly done, it
mapped directly to the values they needed to exchange. Now, think
of what would have happened had it not been a Simple, but instead
some moronic excuse for an eXtensible Network Management Protocol.
Another thing is that we have long had amazingly rich standards for
such “display attributes” as many now use HTML and the like. The
choice to use SGML for web publication was not entirely braindead,
but it should have been obvious from the outset that page display
would become important, if not immediately, then after watching what
people were trying to do with HTML. The Web provided me with a much
needed realization that information cannot be /fully/ separated from
its presentation, and showed me something I knew without verbalizing
explicitly, that the presentation form we choose communicates real
information. Encoding all of it via markup would require a very
fine level of detail, not to mention /awareness/ of issues so widely
dispersed in the population that only a handful of people per
million grasp them. Therefore, to be successful, there must be an
upper limit to the complexity of the language defined with SGML, and
one must go on to solve the next problem, not sit idle with a set of
great tools and think “I ought to use these tools for something”.
Stultifying as the language of content models may be, it amazes me
that people do not grasp that they need to use something else when
it becomes too painful to express with SGML, but I am in the highly
privileged position of knowing a lot more than SGML when I pronounce
my judgment on XML. For one thing, I knew Lisp before I saw SGML,
so I know what brilliant minds can do under optimal conditions and
when they ensure that the problem is still bigger than the solution.

Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
via Erik Naggum’s XML rant.

The Samsung Galaxy S III: The First Smartphone Designed Entirely By Lawyers

So there you have it. A darn-near perfect explanation of the GSIII design. Sure, it’s butt ugly, but it’s also 100% (well maybe 90%) lawyer approved.  An amorphous, unsymmetrical blob that doesn’t come in black, with a non-permanent dock and non-square icons. There’s no way Apple can add this design to their Samsung lawsuit.

So Samsung, was it worth it? Your product won’t sell as well, but you won’t piss off one of your biggest component customers either. I understand the motivation, but I still feel like you’ve sold your soul.

When Apple started patent trolling, they basically admitted they weren’t going to win in an open market, and they decided to drag Samsung down with them. The crazy thing is, Samsung is letting them. They’ve ceded ownership of the rectangle and other common sense design traits to Apple, and did everything they could to bow down to their largest customer.

The result? A phone designed by lawyers. What a scary precedent.

The Samsung Galaxy S III: The First Smartphone Designed Entirely By Lawyers.

rePost::The exasperation of Andrew Bynum – TrueHoop Blog – ESPN

Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer have researched what makes people miserable at work, and wrote this for The Washington Post:
Over the past 15 years, we have studied what makes people happy and engaged at work. In discovering the answer, we also learned a lot about misery at work. …
What we discovered is that the key factor you can use to make employees miserable on the job is to simply keep them from making the progress they expect to make in meaningful work.
People want to make a valuable contribution, and feel great when they make progress toward doing so.
Andrew Bynum leads the league in looking exasperated. He is often seen as childish because of it. What’s one lost chance? Nothing, really. The thing that happened to Bynum on that play happens to everybody. Grow up, kid.
But what happened on that play happens to Bynum a lot.
via The exasperation of Andrew Bynum – TrueHoop Blog – ESPN.