snewe

Somewhat random fact: comment solutions like IntenseDebate and Disqus incorporate Quantcast into their js, so you are indirectly getting counted by such services if you use IntenseDebate, etc. I searched for an out-clause, but found none.

Easy credit explains a big part of the increases in tuition. Gov't subsidies that underly the ease of racking up 100K in student loans could directly impact the cost of college. If everyone applying to university can pay either through a loan or out-of-pocket, then it makes sense for colleges to raise prices. In turn, the employees of that company (the university) have higher productivity in real dollars so they all get higher wages.

People often think that they need more student loans because college is becoming more expensive. It is more likely that college is becoming more expensive because the gov't makes loans for college too cheap.

Maybe Gates simply timed his exit and Microsoft's stock price was going to fall anyway. Classic endogeneity problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogeneity_(economics)

The beer pong guy was only trying to raise $10,000 and had one employee. Trying to raise millions requires finding investment banks with rich clients who will subscribe to your initial offering. If a firm wants to raise millions in an IPO (and you aren't Google), you have to hire one or several investment banks to shop your shares around. They charge huge fees, typically a percentage of the total offering.

Matlab? Mathematica?

http://www.sagemath.org/ http://www.monkeyanalytics.com/

I am not sure what "HTML 5" has to do with analytics software though. I usually don't need video or crazy mouse capabilities when doing statistical analysis.

If you fail to upgrade immediately, malware is often installed and remains after an upgrade. I missed one site by a day and got infected. The default option to print the WP version in the <head> of each blog would certainly lower the likelihood of a script finding an outdated site. Unfortunately once hacked, truly cleaning the site requires

1. Backing up theme, making list of plugins installed 2. Inspecting theme for any hacks. (difficult if you wrote your own) 3. Deleting _all_ files 4. Walking through the wp_options table for any leftover holes (very difficult) 5. Re-install WP 6. Re-install theme and plugins.

The WP team needs to work in something like you linked to into the core.

Original story without the splash page:

http://prominentsecurity.com/?p=119

It also says that the flaw has been patched:

"*Update (5/22/10): After reporting the flaw to Facebook Wednesday afternoon, I have confirmed as of Friday afternoon that the flaw has been successfully patched. Facebook now strictly enforces the existence of the “post_form_id” CSRF protection token in the request."

YouTube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik&feature=playe...

Not sure what you mean by "apply to corporations." Free speech is basically an extension of property rights. If you own a piece of land, you can stand on it and do and say almost anything (other than incite a riot, etc.) you want. Corporations are legal entities owned by the same people that have the aforementioned rights. If the gov't limits the freedom of speech of corporations, it limits the freedom of its shareholder owners.

Although I can't say I agree with Apple's decision, people forget that free speech doesn't apply here. Apple owns the means to get on the App Store. They can decide what suits the platform in whatever way they see fit. In some sense, the right that Apple has to do this -- own and rent a "podium," the App Store -- is also free speech.

Blog spam: http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-wave-available...

> So it doesn't bother you that this "investment" doesn't have any relation to building productive enterprises of any sort?

As the article points out, these firms provide liquidity which makes trading faster and cheaper. Theoretically, more liquidity should also make it easier to move capital to the most profitable enterprises.

Unless we assume that these people are completely ignorant of the public nature of their status updates, then this isn't a privacy violation. Is the argument that Facebook defaults to public and makes it confusing to change settings?

I don't see this as effective advertising (though that is what gets you to buy it) as much as effective UX design. I never thought I needed a phone with anything but the ability to call, but now I can't imagine not having an phone with internet, GPS, email, etc. That change wasn't advertising, but the best design and form factor made at the time of its release.

Advertising gets you into the store, but an innovative product creates the "need we never knew we had."

Can someone show evidence of this statement?

"Now, say you you write a public update, saying, “My boss had a crazy great idea for a new product!” Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your post now shows up on that page. Include the words “FBI” or “CIA,” and you show up on the FBI or CIA page."

That is scary.

This is really bad. I administer a site that uses IntenseDebate. That site has not integrated any of the Facebook Graph API at all. However, we do allow Facebook logins through Intense Debate. To my surprise, I see that this site has been added to my Facebook applications.

So, if you use third party sites that in turn use Facebook's API, you effectively add Facebook Graph API to your app.

Google Drawings?

http://docs.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=28131&...

Direct link:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-april-28-2010/appholes

This could be very helpful, so long as academics maintain their profiles. I currently use an ad-hoc system of Google Reader's "check if webpage changed" functionality to check for new papers in my fields of interest. For economics, these are listed on pages like:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?code=M13

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?code=G24

which gives an ugly summary of updates to non-RSS friendly websites. Academia.edu appears to require that

1. Authors sign up

2. Authors also update their profiles with their new research

My experience suggests this will be difficult for econ: I repeated the Google readers process for the active authors in my field. Google tracks their "Working Papers" pages for updates and lets me know when they add a paper (or change a font!) For the two dozen authors I track, only one has updated their page in the last two months.

Here is the paper they cite: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1502864

One of the authors of the research paper has a lot of work on innovation and open source in general:

http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers.htm

Blogspam:

http://blog.posterous.com/private/cvywyxHCnB

The story: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/03/26/2010-03-26_city_p...

Also see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1213092

Will the automated content include interviews with players or quotes from coaches? You would need to scrape that content from non-automated sports stories.

Is it really eating away at EE or is it just a huge growth in support questions for Rails, iPhone, CSS, jquery that SO has an advantage in? The top search term for EE is Microsoft Outlook, while the top (non brand) search term for SO is "from_tag rails." Seems like search demographics are a huge part of the relative growth differences.

But demand -- in the long run -- is directly related to reliability/consistency. I think that this model can work, but it will take time before institutions integrate the data into mission-critical applications. I see this idea as a means of small, niche data-providers to start their own firms and perhaps start to provide the data independently of Data Marketplace.

One reason i-banks and academics pay top dollar for data is reliability and consistency. How does Data Marketplace address errors in user-collected data? Do they guarantee its quality? If I spend $10,000 on a quarterly update on CRSP and find a systematic mistake, they will fix it without charge. Such mistakes are hard to find because CRSP has a reputation to maintain. I wonder if users hired to collect data have the same constraints.

From my experience, Prius drivers in SoCal are usually over-50. We used to have a game called "Prius" that simply involved yelling "Prius" everytime one was observed (there are a TON down here). Most of the time, we saw an older driver.

Interesting note:

"Includes a secure website for you to showcase performance & environmental benefits."

Why must a lack of a camera be in every article on the iPad? Am I the only longtime MacBook owner that never uses that little camera above my screen?