Albener Pessoa

Meu primeiro contato com O Pasquim foi um livro de compilação de piadas que achei, quando ainda era criança, no meio da biblioteca do meu pai: “As Anedotas do Pasquim – Volume 1″. Só depois de alguns anos é que fui saber que aquele volume era produto de um jornal que desafiou a ditadura, teve colaboradores do naipe de Millôr Fernandes, Tarso de Castro, Ivan Lessa, Vinicius de Moraes, Henfil, Paulo Francis, Ziraldo, Dalton Trevisan, Sérgio Augusto e Caetano Veloso, tirou o paletó e a gravata do jornalismo brasileiro ao publicar entrevistas antológicas com personalidades como Leila Diniz e Madame Satã, e mesmo tendo passado por pressões constantes do regime militar, durou 1.072 edições e circulou de 1969 a 1991. No fim, creio que a melhor descrição do que foi O Pasquim foi cunhada por Jaguar, um dos fundadores do semanário humorístico que marcou época no Brasil:

Um grupo de jornalistas e cartunistas se reuniu em pleno AI-5 para falar mal do governo. Só tem uma explicação: privação coletiva dos sentidos.”

Porém, o que eu desconhecia até pouco tempo atrás é que as Anedotas do Pasquim também tinham sido lançados no formato de disco, com piadas sendo contadas por quatro dos maiores humoristas brasileiros de todos os tempos: Ziraldo, Zé Vasconcellos, Ronald Golias e Chico Anysio. De quebra, o álbum foi produzido por Arnaud Rodrigues, ator e comediante que, nos anos 70, formou com Chico Anysio e Renato Piau o grupo Baiano e os Novos Caetanos. Esse disco de anedotas foi lançado pela Warner em 1980, está fora de catálogo há anos e acabou sendo resgatado pela internet. Taí uma pérola boa demais que eu não poderia deixar passar em branco.

O post As Anedotas do Pasquim, com Chico Anysio, Golias, Zé Vasconcellos e Ziraldo apareceu primeiro em Pensar Enlouquece, Pense Nisso.

Now this is interesting.

Peter Swire and Yianni Lagos have pre-published a law journal article on the risks of data portability. It specifically addresses an EU data protection regulation, but the security discussion is more general.

...Article 18 poses serious risks to a long-established E.U. fundamental right of data protection, the right to security of a person's data. Previous access requests by individuals were limited in scope and format. By contrast, when an individual's lifetime of data must be exported 'without hindrance,' then one moment of identity fraud can turn into a lifetime breach of personal data.

They have a point. If you're going to allow users to download all of their data with one command, you might want to double- and triple-check that command. Otherwise it's going to become an attack vector for identity theft and other malfeasance.

How to ensure that results in psychology (and other fields) are replicated has become a popular topic of discussion recently. There's no doubt that many results fail to replicate, and also, that people don't even try to replicate findings as much as they should.


Yet psychologist Gregory Francis warns that replication per se is not always a good thing: Publication bias and the failure of replication in experimental psychology

Among experimental psychologists, successful replication enhances belief in a finding, while a failure to replicate is often interpreted to mean that one of the experiments is flawed. This view is wrong.

Because experimental psychology uses statistics, empirical findings should appear with predictable probabilities. In a misguided effort to demonstrate successful replication of empirical findings and avoid failures to replicate, experimental psychologists sometimes report too many positive results.

Rather than strengthen confidence in an effect, too much successful replication actually indicates publication bias, which invalidates entire sets of experimental findings...

Even populations with strong effects should have some experiments that do not reject the null hypothesis. Such null findings should not be interpreted as failures to replicate, because if the experiments are run properly and reported fully, such nonsignificant
findings are an expected outcome of random sampling... If there are not enough null findings in a set of moderately powered experiments, the experiments were either not run properly or not fully reported. If experiments are not run properly or not reported fully, there is no reason to believe the reported effect is real.

Say you took a pack of playing cards and removed half the red cards. Your pack would now be 2/3rds black, so if you took a random sample of cards, say a poker hand of 5 cards, then you'd expect more blacks than reds (a significant 'effect' of color). But you'd still expect some reds, and some random hands would in fact be entirely red, just by chance. If someone claimed to have drawn 10 random hands and they'd all been mainly black, that would be implausible - "too good".

Francis's approach is a bit like Uri Simonsohn's method for detecting fraudulent data - they both work on the principle that "If it's too good to be true, it's probably false" - but they differ in their specifics, and I believe that we should not conflate fraud with publication bias... so let's not get carried away with the parallels.

Earlier this year, Francis wrote a critical letter about a paper published in PNAS purporting to show that wealthier Americans are less ethical. He argued that the paper's results were "unbelievable" - it reported on the results of seven separate experiments, all of which showed a small, but significant, effect in favour of the hypothesis.

Even if rich people really were meaner, Francis said, the chance of 7/7 experiments being positive is very low: just by chance, you'd expect some of them to show no difference (given that the size of the difference in those seven was low, with a lot of overlap between the groups). Francis suggested that the authors may have run more than seven experiments, and only published the positive ones; the authors denied this in their Letter.

Anyway, in the new paper, Francis expands on this approach in much more detail, drawing from this 2007 paper, and suggests a Bayesian approach that might help mitigate the problem.

Francis G (2012). Publication bias and the failure of replication in experimental psychology. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review PMID: 23055145

#a empolgação não contagiante – e você descobriu algum seriado/livro/filme e ele é espetacular. é a série que superará sopranos, é o livro que te fez achar guerra e paz uma bula de remédio, é o filme que fez cidadão kane pagar comédia. e você está absolutamente empolgado, desproporcionalmente fascinado, anormalmente intoxicado de alegria, de maneira que você gostaria de dormir com aquele livro, casar com aquele filme, oferecer orgasmos múltiplos para aquele box de dvd sem nem mesmo precisar daqueles 20 minutinhos dormindo no meio porque ninguém é de ferro e você fica todo suado também então daí é sempre bacana tomar um banho. e claro, você também quer espalhar essa boa nova para o máximo de pessoas possível, sejam eles amigos, familiares, colegas de trabalho ou apenas estranhos que porventura tiverem mantido contato visual contigo no metrô por mais de 3 segundos.

mas aí você vai tentar descrever a série e por um misto de empolgação, baixa capacidade para se expressar de forma clara e uso excessivo e caótico de interrogações, o que sai é “então, é muito foda, é sobre cowboys no espaço, sabe? tem cavalos e eles falam chinês e eles traficam carga e tem o cara que faz castle e pô, é no espaço. e tem aquela mina do seriado do exterminador do futuro, mas essa série era meio ruim, mas é do diretor de buffy, você gostou de vingadores, certo?e tem o pirata daquele filme de queimada com o ben stiller, acho esse cara foda, você precisa ver essa série. no espaço.”. e aí sua namorada não apenas decide que nunca vai ver firefly porque é um globo rural futurista [no espaço] como te pergunta se você não devia maneirar no café. mas você nem bebe café, é foda a vida.

#a necessidade de se justificar para estranhos – começa como um recurso defensivo de uma mente levemente neurótica e treinada para pensar sempre no pior – “estou comprando um gorro, vão pensar que eu vou cometer algum crime, vou dizer pro vendedor algo como ‘hahaha, estou comprando esse gorro mas não vou cometer crimes, hein?’-  e com o tempo se transforma num péssimo hábito que te leva a constantemente, e sem a necessidade de nenhum tipo de pressão, oferecer a estranhos, nas mais diversas situações, informações totalmente desnecessárias sobre a sua vida. você não sai mais cedo do trabalho, você sai mais cedo porque precisa passar no médico pra ver o joelho machucado; você não recusa o cinema porque tem outro compromisso, você recusa o cinema porque tem esse problema de quando fala ao telefone com a sua mãe ir só concordando com tudo que ela diz e sem saber acabou aceitando ir com ela num show do oswaldo montenegro e agora baixou um cd dele ao vivo pra pelo menos conhecer as canções mais novas e tal. chato não pode cantar junto.

e isso vai acontecendo sistematicamente na sua vida, com justificativas pro guardinha na praia (“eu não fiz nada de errado, eu apenas tenho receio de policiais”), pro cobrador do ônibus (“eu tô te dando essa de vinte porque não tive tempo pra conseguir trocado”), pro síndico do prédio (“a torneira quebrou mas não foi culpa minha”) até chegar no fatídico dia em que você vai no pão de açúcar no meio da madrugada pra comprar umas coisas que faltaram pra pizza e uns itens pra pipoca de amanhã e nota que chegou na frente do caixa segurando apenas um salame inteiro e um pote grande de margarina. é foda a vida.

 

Rafer Roberts is running a Kickstarter campaign for his Plastic Farm comic, but that doesn’t mean he can’t do other awesome things, too, like illustrate a three-page comic Justin Jordan (The Strange Talent of Luther Strode) wrote about Thanos, Darkseid and some very special coffee. I was going to lament that I can’t actually buy Thanos’ “Titan Love Letter” blend, but after hearing him and Darkseid talk about it, maybe it’s best that way. Grab a cup of your own favorite joe, read the rest of the comic, then go help Roberts out with a Kickstarter donation. That sounds like a great way to start the day.

O Paiaço é…. vidente =O

Submitted by: grojarules
Posted at: 2012-10-21 20:34:44
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/5656742

While Timelords are concerned with time and space, we humans are just concerned with time. We also love to watch shows about a man travelling around in a police box. That’s why this Doctor Who TARDIS Projection Alarm Clock is perfect. This Doctor Who TARDIS Projection Alarm Clock projects the time along with the Doctor [...]

LEBLON - O governador Sérgio Cabral convocou uma coletiva de imprensa no restaurante Napkin´s para anunciar as regras do edital de licitação para a concessão do Rio de Janeiro pelos próximos 35 anos - com exceção do Pão de Açúcar, arrendado perpetuamente por Abílio Diniz. O concessionário terá de fazer obras de infraestrutura, como a construção de estacionamentos, bares, restaurantes, helipontos, lojas e áreas de lazer. Em troca, ganhará licença para explorar os pontos nobres ocupados por flanelinhas, camelôs e apontadores do jogo do bicho. É responsabilidade da empresa erguer também o Museu do Romário, um busto de Eike Batista em cada posto da orla e regulamentar a prática do altinho. "Com isso, a capacidade máxima da cidade vai diminuir para 4 milhões de pessoas", explicou Cabral.

Não vou falar das miudezas, como cabos e adaptadores, ou a incrível mas já tediosa exposição dos números da Apple. O foco aqui é o que não foi mostrado, por pura estratégia. Vamos a eles:

1 – Mapas

Nada foi falado. Tim Cook se desculpou de forma atípica para a empresa, algum tempo atrás, e o caso está encaminhado. A Apple vai virar mundos e fundos para consertar a hagada, e enquanto isso não acontecer, não faz sentido chutar cachorro morto, ainda mais depois que você vendeu o cachorro pros seus usuários.

Os mapas ficaram de fora inclusive da apresentação do iPad, tradicionalmente uma plataforma excelente pra esse tipo de uso. Sete meses atrás eram a estrela da casa. Faz parte.

2 – Apple TV

Manja a sogra que visita sem ser chamada, fica o dia inteiro monopolizando a televisão, assiste Vale a Pena Ver de Novo, todas as novelas mas de vez em quando faz um cozido sensacional? Essa é a Apple TV. Não cresce, ainda é geek demais, mas tem uma base fiel de usuários, e todo mundo dentro da Apple adora o brinquedinho.

Ela é uma espécie de Irmã Especial do iPhone. Limitada, com diversos problemas, não faz muito do que os outros fazem, mas é muito amada e nunca será deixada para trás.

Esse Forrest Gump da Apple raramente apareceu em 2007. Foi atualizada em 2008, ganhou uma segunda geração em 2010 e uma terceira em 2012. Nesse meio-tempo o iPhone teve 6 encarnações.

A Apple não sabe o que fazer com a Apple TV. Ela é grande demais para ser cancelada e pequena demais para ser relevante. É um projeto que caiu nas graças de Steve Jobs e foi tão bem-vendido internamente, e é tão barato no Grande Esquema das Coisas, que ninguém é desalmado a ponto de puxar a tomada.

3 – TV Apple

Todo evento da Apple aparece um monte de site anunciando a chegada da TV da Apple. Uma espécie de Reed Richards TV, muito além de uma simples Smart TV. Seria ótimo, mas o pessoal mais sensato duvida que a Apple vá entrar nessa área.

O mercado de TVs é muito restrito. As pessoas não estão dispostas a pagar tanto quanto seus gadgets, a meia-vida de uma TV é enorme, e a receita total do segmento é de US$30 bilhões. Isso pra Apple é troco de pinga.

Muito provavelmente a aporrinhação de investir na área não compensará o retorno obtido. Mesmo assim, cobram.

4 – Siri na Toca, digo, no Mac

Não há nenhuma justificativa técnica para Siri não funcionar nos Macbooks. Ao menos do lado do cliente. Muito provavelmente a Apple não vê utilidade no serviço rodando num computador fixo, e o consumo de recursos de servidores não compense o investimento.

Mesmo assim é algo que muita gente quer, para poder realizar o sonho de todo fã de ficção científica, conversar com o computador e ele responder, sem sermos taxados de esquizofrênicos. (quem assistia House reconheceu a citação).

Claro, ainda há muito a fazer antes de um sistema de controle de voz ser realmente seguro num PC, mas alguém tem que ser pioneiro, e a Apple é boa nisso.

It's now widely recognised that social and economic inequality is an important factor related to how religious a given society is. But what's less clear is whether inequality actually increases support for religious politicians - and whether this affects the rich as well as the poor.

Ekrem Karakoç (Binghamton University, USA) and Birol Bașkan (Georgetown University, Qatar) used data from the 2000 World Values Survey to test this relationship. They found that older, less-educated, poorer people, and women, all tended to favour politicians with strong religious beliefs. They also preferred leaders who allowed their religion to influence their decisions.

People affiliated to one of the major religions also supported religious influence in politics. That's not surprising, but what is surprising is that there was almost no difference among the religions. Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Hindus all wanted religious leaders - the only exception was Protestants.

Even after taking all these factors into account, they found that people living in the more unequal societies tended to be more in favour of religious leaders.

Now, the interesting thing is that this was the case for both rich and poor, confirming something similar that has previously been shown. However, the effect was somewhat stronger for the poor, meaning the gap attitudes between the rich and poor does increase slightly as you go from equal to unequal societies.

That's what you would expect, of course. In unequal societies the poor have less security and so turn to both God and religious organisations to try to obtain that security.

This, then helps to explain why unequal nations are more religious. What is not known, and rather more controversial, is the extent to which this is a reinforcing phenomenon. To what extent does voting for religious politicians actually increase inequality?

---

Karakoc, E., & Baskan, B. (2012). Religion in Politics: How Does Inequality Affect Public Secularization? Comparative Political Studies DOI: 10.1177/0010414012453027

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

One of my earliest memories of being scared by a movie was When A Stranger Calls. I wonder if it’s still scary?

Here are more Halloween cartoons – and tomorrow’s my annual Halloween caption contest!

Author Dominic Streatfeild interviewed many trained military, intelligence and police interrogators for his book Brainwash and I’ve just realised he’s put the full text of the interviews online.

They’re in equal measures fascinating, disturbing and sometimes worryingly relevant, as the ‘war on terror’ still relies on many of the same physical coercion techniques used in conflicts past.

The interviewees discuss their experiences of being interrogated to being interrogators and range from being captured in the Korean War, to counter-insurgency in Yemen, to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, to the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan.

[Interrogation subjects in the world of intelligence tend to construct series of cover stories, like the skins of an onion. Interrogators have to] go through these stories, peeling the onion, trying to get to the core. And eventually, people run out of stories.

The interviews are:

Interview with British Interrogator #1
Interview with British Interrogator #2
Interview with British Interrogator #3
Interview with SAS NCO Trained Interrogator
Interview with Senior Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer
Interview with US Army Interrogator #1

For the recent Observer article on forensic science and the psychological biases that affect it, I spoke to cognitive scientist Itiel Dror about his work.

I could only include some brief quotes from a more in-depth exchange, so for those wanting more on the psychology of forensic examining, here’s Dror on how evidence can be skewed and why these effects have been ignored for so long.

What do you think has been the turning point for the forensic science community in terms of beginning to accept the role of cognitive bias in interpretation of evidence?

I think the clear cut scientific research with actual forensic examiners which was a within-subject experimental design, showing that the *same* expert, examining the *same* evidence, can reach different conclusions when they are affected by bias. The problem was also demonstrated in fingerprinting and DNA, very robust forensic domains.

I think you are very right to say that they have ‘began’. There has been a change, for example, the UK Forensic Regulator is now onboard. But there is still a way to go.

Which area of forensic science do you think is currently most susceptible to cognitive bias?

It will be the forensic science areas in which, as I like to say, the human examiner is the main instrument of analysis. These are most of the forensic domains: fingerprinting, DNA, CCTV images, firearms, shoe and tire marks, document examination, and so on. When there is no instrument that says ‘match’ or ‘no-match’ and it is in the ‘eye of the beholder’ to make the judgement, then subjectivity comes in, and is open to cognitive bias.

Essentially, forensic areas in which there are no objective criteria: where it is the forensic expert who compares visual patterns and determines if they are ‘sufficiently similar’ or ‘sufficiently consistent’. For example, whether two fingerprints were made by the same finger, whether two bullets were fired from the same gun, whether two signatures were made by the same person. Such determinations are governed by a variety of cognitive processes.

The cognitive nature of subjectivity is that it can be influenced and biased by extraneous contextual information. Forensic scientists work within a variety of such influences: from knowing the nature and details of the crime, to being indirectly pressurized by detectives, from seeing the ‘target’, to working within and as part of the police, from computer generated meta-data, to appearing in courts within an adversarial criminal justice system, and so on. The contextual influences are many and they come in many forms, some of which are subtle. So, many, most of the forensic areas are vulnerable.

It seems there is a reluctance to change procedures to minimise cognitive bias. Where does the resistance come from?

There are still forensic examiners who think that are immune to context and do not understand, let alone accept, the existence and danger of cognitive bias. They often confuse ‘bias’ (as in being racist, anti-Semitic etc) with cognitive bias; and this makes some of them think that it is an ethical issue. Forensic examiners rarely, if at all, receive training in this area and in the rare occasions that they do, they get bad training from people who do not specialise in providing training about cognitive bias in forensics.

The forensic community, as the military, police, and so on, are all very hard to change; there is a strong culture within those organisations. It is especially hard to promote change when errors are not as apparent as in other domains. If the police shoot an innocent person, then they very quickly know that they made a mistake, if a surgeon amputates the wrong leg, then they know very quickly that they made a mistake. In contrast, in the forensic domain, in real criminal cases, we do not know the ground truth, and do not really know if a mistake has happened or not. Only in very rare and special circumstances do errors surface (as in the Mayfield and McKie cases).

The courts have basically for the most part blindly accepted most of the forensic evidence. So, the examiners see no reason to change, if the courts accepts their evidence, then that is that. This may be changing. The hope is that judges will be more aware of the danger of cognitive bias and not accept forensic conclusions that are tainted with bias.
 

Link to further reading from Itiel Dror.

In 1998 I briefly worked for FiringSquad, a gaming website founded by Doom and Quake champion Thresh aka Dennis Fong and his brother Kyle. I can trace my long-standing interest in chairs and keyboards to some of the early, groundbreaking articles they wrote. Dennis and Kyle were great guys to work with, and we'd occasionally chat on the phone about geeky hardware hotrodding stuff, like the one time they got so embroiled in PC build one-upmanship that they were actually building rack-mount PCs … for their home.

So I suppose it is inevitable that I'd eventually get around to writing an article about building rack-mount PCs. But not the kind that go in your home. No, that'd be as nuts as the now-discontinued Windows Home Server product.

Servers belong in their native habitat, the datacenter. Which can be kind of amazing places in their own right.

The above photo is from Facebook's Open Compute Project, which is about building extremely energy efficient datacenters. And that starts with minimalistic, no-frills 1U server designs, where 1U is the smallest amount of space divisible in a server rack.

I doubt many companies are big enough to even consider building their own datacenter, but if Facebook is building their own custom servers out of commodity x86 parts, couldn't we do it too? In a world of inexpensive, rentable virtual machines, like Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Azure Cloud, does it really make sense to build your own server and colocate it in a datacenter?

It's kind of tough to tell exactly how much an Amazon EC2 instance will cost you since it varies a lot by usage. But if I use the Amazon Web Services simple monthly calculator and select the Web Application "common customer sample", that provides a figure of $1,414 per month, or $17k/year. If you want to run a typical web app on EC2, that's what you should expect to pay. So let's use that as a baseline.

The instance types included in the Web Application customer sample are 24 small (for the front end), and 12 large (for the database). Here are the current specs on the large instance:

• 7.5 GB memory
• 2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each
• 850 GB instance storage
• 64-bit platform
• I/O Performance: High

You might be wondering what the heck a EC2 Compute Unit is; it's Amazon's way of normalizing CPU performance. By their definition, what we get in the large instance is akin to an old 2008 era dual core 2.4 GHz Xeon CPU. Yes, you can pay more and get faster instances, but switching instances from the small to the high-CPU and from the large to the high-MEM more than doubles the bill to $3,302 per month or $40k/year.

Assuming you subscribe to the theory of scaling out versus scaling up, building a bunch of decent bang-for-the-buck commodity servers is what you're supposed to be doing. I avoided directly building servers when we were scaling up Stack Overflow, electing to buy pre-assembled hardware from Lenovo instead. But this time, I decided the state of hardware has advanced sufficiently since 2009 that I'm comfortable cutting out the middleman in 2012 and building the servers myself, from scratch. That's why I just built four servers exactly like this:

• Intel Xeon E3-1280 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.6 Ghz / 4.0 Ghz turbo quad-core ($640)
• SuperMicro X9SCM-F-O ($190)
• 32 GB DDR3-1600 ($292)
• SuperMicro SC111LT-330CB 1U rackmount chassis ($200)
• Two Samsung 830 512GB hard drives in a RAID-1 mirror ($540 × 2)

(If you are using this as a shopping list, you will also need 4-pin power extensions for the case, and the SuperMicro 1u passive heatsink. The killer feature of SuperMicro motherboards that makes them all server-y in the first place is the built in hardware KVM-over-IP. That's right, unless the server is literally unplugged, you can remote in and install an operating system, tweak the BIOS, power it on and off, and so on. It works. I use it daily.)

Based on the above specs, this server has comparable memory to the High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance, comparable CPU power to the High-CPU Extra Large Instance, and comparable disk performance to the High I/O Quadruple Extra Large Instance. This is a very, very high end server by EC2 standards. It would be prohibitively expensive to run this hardware in the Amazon cloud. But how much will it cost us to build? Just $2,452. Adding 10% for taxes, shipping, etc let's call it $2,750 per server. One brand new top-of-the-line server costs about as much as two months of EC2 web application hosting.

Of course, that figure doesn't include the cost in time to build and rack the server, the cost of colocating the server, and the ongoing cost of managing and maintaining the server. But I humbly submit that the one-time cost of paying for three of these servers, plus the cost of colocation, plus a bunch of extra money on top to cover provisioning and maintenance and support, will still be significantly less than $17,000 for a single year of EC2 web application hosting. Every year after the first year will be gravy, until the servers are obsolete – which even conservatively has to be at least three years. Perhaps most importantly, these servers will offer vastly better performance than you could get from EC2 to run your web application, at least not without paying astronomical amounts of money for the privilege.

(If you are concerned about power consumption, don't be. I just measured the power use of the server using my trusty Kill-a-Watt device: 31 watts (0.28 amps) at idle, 87 watts (0.75 amps) under never-gonna-happen artificial 100% CPU load. The three front fans in the SuperMicro case are plugged into the motherboard and only spin up at boot and under extreme load. It's shockingly quiet in typical use for a 1U server.)

I realize that to some extent we're comparing apples and oranges. Either you have a perverse desire to mess around with hardware, or you're more than willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have someone else worry about all that stuff (and, to be fair, give you levels of flexibility, bandwidth, and availability that would be impossible to achieve even if you colocate servers at multiple facilities). $51,000 over three years is enough to pay for a lot of colocation and very high end hardware. But maybe the truly precious resource at your organization is people's time, not money, and that $51k is barely a rounding error in your budget.

Anyway, I want to make it clear that building and colocating your own servers isn't (always) crazy, it isn't scary, heck, it isn't even particularly hard. In some situations it can make sense to build and rack your own servers, provided …

• you want absolute top of the line server performance without paying thousands of dollars per month for the privilege
• you are willing to invest the time in building, racking, and configuring your servers
• you have the capital to invest up front
• you desire total control over the hardware
• you aren't worried about the flexibility of quickly provisioning new servers to handle unanticipated load
• you don't need the redundancy, geographical backup, and flexibility that comes with cloud virtualization

Why do I choose to build and colocate servers? Primarily to achieve maximum performance. That's the one thing you consistently just do not get from cloud hosting solutions unless you are willing to pay a massive premium, per month, forever: raw, unbridled performance. I'm happy to spend money on nice dedicated hardware because I know that hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive.

But to be totally honest with you, mostly I build servers because it's fun.

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Submitted by: alexcorvette
Posted at: 2012-10-19 03:47:58
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/5637358

There’s a great project for LEGO MINDSTORMS just started on Kickstarter by MinuteBot.  BrainPower is a way to plug your NXT into the wall!

Previously, these folks brought us the MinuteBase, a product they designed:

MinuteBot Base is a thick, robust base plate that can be used for construction of robotics based on LEGO Mindstorms.

Now they’re back and they’ve designed something we’ve always wanted: a plug in power supply for the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT.  We do a lot of programming and experimenting with the NXT and we’re constantly running out of batteries.  The BrainPower promises to cure that:

MinuteBot BrainPower is a power supply for LEGO Mindstorms-enabled robotics. Say goodbye to batteries. Just plug and play.

From MinuteBot's Kickstarter Page: BrainPower Explained

See it and support it here!

Esses dias me perguntaram sobre behavioral economics, ou, economia comportamental. Não é a minha área, mas basicamente trata dos casos microeconômicos em que os agentes não são perfeitamente racionais, como nos livros de micoreconomia tradicionais.

Uma frase do The Nudge explicita a crítica da economia comportamental aos princípios básicos de racionalidade:

"Se você olha nos livros de economia, você aprende que o homo economicus pode pensar como Albert Einstein, tem uma memória como a do Big Blue (IBM) e consegue seguir os seus planos com mais perseverança e disciplina que o Gandhi. Mas, as pessoas não são assim. Pessoas normais se atrapalham ao usar uma calculadora, esquecem o aniversário da esposa, e ficam de ressaca no primeiro dia do ano. Não são homo economicus, são homo sapiens".

O vídeo do abaixo explica um pouquinho do tema, sob a visão do professor Dan Ariely, da Duke University, que escreveu o livro Predictably Irrational. Confiram!

DIVINO - Pesquisa do Datafolha divulgada hoje revela que o índice de rejeição de Carminha chegou a impressionantes 49%. Com isso, a vilã fica atrás apenas de José Serra, que tem 52%. Trata-se da maior rejeição desde que o Campeonato Brasileiro começou a ser disputado em pontos corridos. Na lista dos dez primeiros ainda estão Galvão Bueno (46%), José Dirceu (45%), Jorge Vercillo (40%), Otávio Mesquita (37%), Pedro Bial (35%), Fausto Silva (32%), Wanderley Luxemburgo (30%) e Susana Vieira, empatada com Fátima Bernardes (29%). "Pelo menos estou liderando alguma pesquisa", destacou Serra.

#97 – O Ted Mosby: Um contextualizador obsessivo, o Ted Mosby sente uma necessidade incontrolável de, diante de qualquer questão, por mais simples e inócua que seja, oferecer um panorama completo, histórico e detalhado de todos os aspectos relacionados ou não, conseguindo transformar qualquer discussão, mesmo que absolutamente superficial, numa verdadeira palestra. Ele não consegue falar sobre o fluxo de caixa sem apresentar o plano de negócios, não consegue apresentar o projeto sem discutir a missão, não consegue citar o nome de alguém sem mencionar toda a equipe, incluindo background, formação e habilidades específicas e certa vez, quando alguém perguntou quem tinha feito aquele café delicioso ele começou com a frase “a história do café começou nas terras altas da etiópia no século IX…” e todos só conseguiram sair da sala quando o cara da segurança apareceu pra dizer que precisavam apagar as luzes.

Costumam se desenvolver em ambientes nos quais falta liderança, pulso firme ou apenas alguém com coragem de fazer que nem aquelas garotas do programa Fantasia e apontar seguidamente para o relógio. Quando confrontado com o Ted Mosby a melhor solução é apenas simular um outro compromisso e sair da sala, já que qualquer frase do tipo “mas você não poderia focar mais no assunto da pauta?” levará a uma discussão aprofundada da etimologia da palavra pauta. E eu não tô zoando, eu já vi isso acontecer.

#98 – O questionador de premissas: Um subproduto da constante cobrança no ambiente corporativo por profissionais que “pensem fora da caixa” e da incompreensão de muitos jovens diante dos conceitos de inovação e criatividade de alguns empreendedores modernos, o questionador de premissas é aquele cara que acha necessário desconstruir todo e qualquer conceito apresentado, por mais simples que ele seja e por mais que essa desconstrução não apenas não vá acrescentar nada ao projeto como também vá gerar ruído, confusão e possivelmente quatro horas de discussão que não vão levar a nada além de uma ata de reunião que lembra demais uma música do Blur.

Se você, numa reunião inicial de um projeto para realização de um vídeo institucional, topar com um cara que ao invés de perguntar “pra que é o vídeo?” ou “qual é o público?” diz “mas antes a gente devia pensar: o que é comunicação? o que é institucional? o que é vídeo? por que sentamos em cadeiras?”, saiba que você está diante de um QP e a melhor rota de ação é apenas não convidá-lo para as próximas reuniões ou enviar a ele um convite falso dizendo que a reunião vai ser na copa, porque a tia do café sempre adora um pouco de atenção.

#99 – A pessoa sem vida: Um dos grandes pesadelos de qualquer equipe, o colega sem vida é aquela pessoa que, diante de propostas abusivas da chefia como videoconferências até as 20:00 numa sexta ou reuniões decisivas numa volta de feriado, reage de forma positiva e até ansiosa, baseado apenas na sua própria ausência de coisas melhores para fazer, minando o poder de resistência do resto da gerência já que o chefe sempre vai poder soltar alguma coisa do tipo “mas porque o Celso pode estar aqui domingo seis e meia da manhã fantasiado de galinha para a apresentação do projeto e vocês não? cadê o comprometimento? esperava mais dessa equipe”.

No caso da pessoa sem vida a melhor abordagem é aproximação, reforçando os laços de camaradagem e polarizando o colega para o lado da equipe. Caso isso não funcione o próximo passo são as ameaças veladas, seguidas de intimidação as claras e por fim se aproveitar da ausência de amigos e familiares para dar sumiço na pessoa sem deixar pistas. Recomenda-se o uso de luvas para evitar problemas com digitais

godblessgig-emandhooah:

babywarrior5:

mccunt:

stangefruitandwildthing:

Geraldine Hoff Doyle, was a 17 years (in 1942) while she was working at the American Broach & Machine Co. when a photographer snapped a pic of her on the job.

That image used by J. Howard Miller for the “We Can Do It!” poster, released during World War II. 

Oh shit, that’s the real “Rosie the Riveter” ?

BAMF

BAMF INDEED. This woman deserves all the respect in the universe!

Beyond awesome. Much kudos to you, ma’am.

21. October, 2012