Tadeu

beconinriot:

Progressbar by Vincent Broquaire (artist on Tumblr Via)

GIF by Be Con In Riot

To support its research, academia has created a flood of PhDs who fare poorly in the job market.

Read The Blog Post Here »

Google just got a tad creepier.

Thanks to tweaks made to its terms of service today, Google will be able to use its users’ names and photos in select advertising beginning next month (November 11). The updated terms of service, first noticed by The New York Times, specifically allow for the company to use what it calls “shared endorsements,” which, the Times explains, occur only when a user comments, +1s (Google’s equivalent of a Facebook ‘like’) or follows pages or brands included in Google’s services.

That means anytime a Google Plus user endorses a company—say, McDonald’s—by giving it a +1, Google can then use those endorsements alongside an ad it later runs for the company. Google will only share the endorsed ads with the people who originally saw the endorsement, making it all the more important that users specify the friend groups, or circles with which they share their feedback and reviews. Otherwise, a publicly shared endorsement will allow the company to include a user’s name and photo in online ads distributed to just about anyone. Nearly 400 million users engage with Google Plus either directly or indirectly through interaction with other Google-owned sites like YouTube.

While Google is opting all of its adult users into the scheme, it’s also providing a means of opting out. Users can decide whether or not to share their name and photo in Google’s “shared endorsements” setting. Given the likelihood that many people will never read the company’s updated terms of service, the change is bound to go unnoticed by many of Google’s users.

In the world of social media advertising, Google’s move is merely keeping up with the Joneses. Facebook, for one, already uses its user information in ads. But in the past, Google pegged itself as a standout in this regard; it has talked about not stepping over the “creepy” line, even if it nudges up against it. Given its recent involvement in US National Security Agency’s data sharing scandal, admission that its email service Gmail isn’t private, and this latest ad endeavor, the creepy line looks like it’s being crossed.

freedominwickedness:

perfectly-ultimate-great-shoofle:

10knotes:

akeenerheart:

I can’t stop laughing at this.

what’s this from?

It’s from Yoshihiko and the Demon King’s Castle, an indie Japanese live-action series parodying RPG tropes.

vimeo:

Full Turn by ECAL

A new project from ECAL gives 3D volume to 2D graphics and the result is like a high tech flip book.

vimeo:

CONSTELLACTION by ◥ panGenerator

Here’s a magical installation piece from Polish art collective panGenerator.

Vincent Van Bat

The US government is running out of money to pay its bills. It is so close to reaching the statutory limit on debt at this point that US Treasury secretary Jack Lew has taken “extraordinary measures” to delay becoming delinquent on payments owed.

Republicans offered a deal today to temporarily raise the debt limit, but the saga has left the Treasury with just $32 billion in its operating accounts, less than is held by nine Standard & Poor’s 500 companies in cash and short-term investments. General Electric has nearly three times as much readily accessible cash as the US government right now.

Just six months ago, the Treasury had $151 billion to spend, following US annual tax collection for 2012.  (Those receipts were unusually high as Americans tried to avert higher taxes in 2013 according to Nancy Vanden Houten a government and policy analyst at Stone McCarthy Research Associates.)

	rachel shared this story from Boing Boing:
	Word: "That's a nice idea, but if we're going to celebrate the struggle of indigenous people against genocide and slavery, maybe the right people to celebrate are the indigenous heroes and victims of Europeans, not Europeans who thought better of the unconscionable, no matter how thoroughly they repented."

The latest of The Oatmeal makes a pretty compelling case for hating Christopher Colombus, whose achievements ("discovering" America, sailing from Europe to America, proving the curvature of the Earth) are all BS. More importantly, though, is what Colombus did do: launched a campaign of genocide in order to terrorize indigenous people gold-mining slavery, a program buoyed up by mass slaughter, mutilations, and systematic sexual slavery of girls as young as nine or ten.

Matthew Inman, the Oatmeal's author, proposes celebrating the life of Barolome de las Casas, who also set out to slave and murder his way through the New World, but changed his mind, took the cloth, and spent 50 years defending indigenous people. That's a nice idea, but if we're going to celebrate the struggle of indigenous people against genocide and slavery, maybe the right people to celebrate are the indigenous heroes and victims of Europeans, not Europeans who thought better of the unconscionable, no matter how thoroughly they repented.

Inman cites Howard Zinn's excellent People's History of the United States as a primary reference for the piece, and I concur: Zinn's work and those derived from it (like the graphic novel and the audio of dramatic readings) are important and fantastic works.

Christopher Columbus was awful (but this other guy was not) - The Oatmeal

“Blocktronics ACiD Trip” is an extremely long work of ANSI art, an early computer art form similar to ASCII art. The work was created collaboratively by 22 artists for Demosplash 2013, a demo art event held recently in Pittsburgh. If you don’t want to scroll down all 3,266 lines of ANSI, watch this video version. A small portion of the work is below:

via Waxy.org

video via RaD Man

Anna Anthropy's site Annarchive is a semi-permanent collection of game media, archaeology, and artifacts…collected from illicit websites.

Last month she posted a huge collection of 1983-1993 MS-DOS Shareware games she acquired from Jeremy Penner of Glorious Trainwrecks fame. Shareware software/games are usually limited demos that require purchase to unlock full functionality, and for a while, these games were distributed on floppies and en masse on CD-Roms. 

Well, you can now download these MS-DOS shareware games and fire up your old PC or run the DosBox emulator to give them a shot. Exciting. Relive an earlier era of videogame history.-LT

Dedicated to Pat and Jillian, who I’m sure finish each other’s sentences in a more appropriately romantic way than this. Happy anniversary, you two!

Here are more relationships.

New data from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) show that only 3.2% of the orders placed in the stock market in the second quarter of 2013 actually went through.

Although the SEC isn’t saying as much, experts think it’s a sign that high-frequency trading are flooding the market with orders, overwhelming the average retail or institutional investor. That’s particularly true in stocks traded on exchanges, says former high-frequency trader Dave Lauer. There, a full 99.76% of orders that were placed were never carried out.

High frequency trading firms have been known to flood the market with orders, trying to determine the price institutional or retail investors are offering, then cancel 90% of them a split-second later. This can artificially alter the price of a security, netting high-frequency traders profits at the expense of their counterparties. True, those profits are small—often just pennies. But over time, these firms make millions of dollars.

“A penalty on excessive cancellations, rigorous enforcement of rules regarding information access, and a top-to-bottom study of the NYSE’s 40-year-old Market Data System would be good places to start,” Charles Schwab, founder of the eponymous discount brokerage firm, and Walt Bettinger, its CEO, wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial (paywall) in July.

Eric Hunsader, the founder of market data firm Nanex LLC, estimates that 90-95% of all orders placed come from high-frequency machines. About 70% of executed trades are made by high-frequency machines, according to the research firm Aite Group.

The SEC says it is doing all it can to catch up with high-frequency traders and to better understand the current state of the markets. The organization has been sorely underfunded, and only recently purchased a data analysis tool called “Midas” that will allow it to monitor markets in real-time.

git-slides

Text-based slides using vim and git.

Abuse git’s history rewriting mechanism by creating one commit for each slide.

Within vim, press Space and Backspace (in normal mode) to move forwards and backwards.

Especially useful for live demos with a lot of canned code, which you want to present and run incrementally.