Adventures in Egotism

You see, despite all the hype about social networking, it has now become readily apparent that social networking is not an application in and of itself, but rather a by-product of other activities. While Friendster represents the previous social networking othodoxy of having the social network itself be the application, MySpace, and now Yahoo 360, reflect the new understanding that social networking will be just one aspect of a fully encompassing online “social environment”.

As its name implies, HUD is the federal agency that tends primarily to the needs of cities (although it also helps build houses and infrastructure in rural areas). And part of the problem is that the Bush administration is not especially enthusiastic about cities or the people who live in them; in November John Kerry took 54 percent of the urban vote and 60 percent of the vote in America’s big cities. Also the increasingly expensive Iraq war combined with expansive tax cuts means there’s less money to spend on domestic programs. Necessities such as housing and infrastructure have suddenly become luxuries…

A plaque on every meter (most are $1 an hour) says: “Your meter money will make the difference in Old Pasadena.” And it did. The area is booming. Meters paid for a $5 million makeover of Old Pasadena; they now pay for daily sweeping of streets and sidewalks, trash collection, extra security and marketing.

The core belief that social liberals bring to cases like Ms. Schiavo’s is that the quality of life is a fundamental human value. They don’t emphasize the bright line between life and death; they describe a continuum between a fully lived life and a life that, by the sort of incapacity Terri Schiavo has suffered, is mere existence.

Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Dr. Henry Jenkins and learns how he thinks video games will revolutionize education. Dr. Jenkins is the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-editor of Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Media in Transition).

The Long Tail is about how the mass market is turning into a million niches. The term refers to the yellow part of the sales chart at left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to services. The vertical axis is sales, the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the “hits”, which have dominated our commercial decisions to date. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which I argue in the article will prove equally important in the future now that technology has provided efficient ways to give consumers access to them thanks to the “infnite shelf-space effect” of new distribution mechanisms that break thought the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar. The two big points of the Long Tail theory are these: 1) The yellow part potentially extends forever to the right; 2) The area under that line–the market it represents–may become as big as the hits at the left.

Well, for starters the classic definition of economics is “the science of choice under scarcity”. That’s a warning sign right there. From Adam Smith on, economics has focused almost exclusively on behavior within constraints. My college textbook, Gregory Mankiw’s otherwise excellent Principles of Economics, doesn’t mention the word abundance. And for good reason: if you let the scarcity term in most economic equations go to nothing, you get all sorts of divide-by-zero problems. They basically blow up.

Here’s how it works: in a type of power plant called an integrated gasification combined-cycle facility, we change any fossil fuel, including coal, into a superhot gas that is rich in hydrogen - and in the process strip out pollutants like sulfur and mercury. As in a traditional combustion power plant, the heat generates large amounts of electricity; but in this case, the gas byproducts can be pure streams of hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Next to what’s happening now, official displays of DeMille’s old Ten Commandments monuments seem an innocuous encroachment of religion into public life. It is a full-scale jihad that our government signed onto last weekend, and what’s most scary about it is how little was heard from the political opposition. The Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe pointed out this week that even Joe McCarthy did not go so far as this Congress and president did in conspiring to “try to undo the processes of a state court.” But faced with McCarthyism in God’s name, most Democratic leaders went into hiding and stayed silent. Prayers are no more likely to revive their spines than poor Terri Schiavo’s brain.

“Kids who pledge abstinence are taught that any word that has ’sex’ in it is considered a sexual activity,” Unruh said. “Therefore oral sex is sex, and they are staying away.” [uh, no they aren't]

iPod’s are probably the greatest portable device ever made, but that doesn’t mean they’re perfect. One of the biggest problems with the iPod+iTunes combination is that for some reason they decided to store local preferences on the iPod… thus making them distinctly not local. What this means is that if you have one computer set-up to auto-sync your library, and you want to use your iPod on another computer, each time you plug it in iTunes will offer to erase your iPod’s music collection for you. Not cool.

Scientists are finding that, after all, love really is down to a chemical addiction between people

Adolescents who watch, or even hear, characters talking about sex on a show are twice as likely to have intercourse within a year’s time, new research shows.

Several Imax theaters are refusing to show movies that mention evolution, fearing protests by opponents of the theory.

And remember: Everyone who pledges gets an “I fixed it!” tote bag.