Linkpost 4-15-08

Happy Tax Day! You’re probably more responsible than me, so you sent yours in weeks ago. If not, why not have a tax party? Pull out the power strip, plug in a wireless router, network a printer, and you’ve got a home office for as many friends as fit into your place to work on taxes until 11:35, when you can dash to the post office and use their electronic mailing system to get that all-important 4-15 timestamp. While you’re in line, read The history of the post office.

  • What Does Google Know About Us? The company’s buying ecommerce sites to try to see into the one area it doesn’t already know; more about the data it stores from our searches.
  • How to stop worrying and learn to love your superusers. If you run an IT department, you’ve probably already tried to recruit many of these people to your side: technology powerhouses who do not have technology-specific jobs.
  • Hackers exploit poor website code. Coding practices are not standardized, so new programmers make the same mistakes, and for the hackers, the same techniques still work as a result.
  • Muxtape is a service that allows you to upload mp3s, order them as you’d like them to be played, and create a “mix tape” that is a web page that plays these mp3s back on any modern browser. Some friends were messing around and created mixes you may enjoy.
  • http://smoovebert.muxtape.com
  • http://athloi.muxtape.com
  • http://headphonic.muxtape.com
  • http://howcoolami.muxtape.com
  • http://endtag.muxtape.com
  • http://divzero.muxtape.com
  • http://cissy.muxtape.com
  • The Typo Eradication Advancement League prowls around America, finding common screwups in the English language, and when given permission, fixing them.
  • Hacking the Hackers. A mature response to malware: find the people hacking you, and hack them to identify them and shut it down. Critics say it’s sociopathic, everyone else thinks it’s cool.
  • Letter from a reader:

    i am sadaf mansoor.i am a student of fine arts.i need ur help for my thesis.my topic is the value of writings.
    The power of writing is ending b’coz of computer.now a days people do there work on computer.they don’t read books n write on a paper.the value of writing is ending.if we see in history of writing we will find it’s value.how it’s come to us.can u tell me how computer as affect the power of writing ^

    How did computers affect the power of writing. Well, computers increased the general literacy process, so now more people than ever before can read a newspaper, write a simple response, and navigate a computer and network. However, this means that those who are writing have simplified their content for that audience. In addition, the increase in common knowledge means that writing becomes more specialized, so niches are most common and few generalists exist. This all adds up to a lack of clear voices and more confusion, but more flexibility about what people can choose to believe, which means that most people read what they already agree with. There’s also another side effect of this opinion pluralism:

    1) If a media outlet cares about its reputation for accuracy, it will be reluctant to report anything that counters the audiences’ existing beliefs because such stories will tend to erode the company’s standing. Newspapers and news programs have a visible incentive to “distort information to make it conform with consumers’ prior beliefs.”

    2) The media can’t satisfy their audiences by merely reporting what their audience wants to hear. If alternative sources of information prove that a news organization has distorted the news, the organization will suffer a loss of reputation, and hence of profit. The authors predict more bias in stories where the outcomes aren’t realized for some time (foreign war reporting, for example) and less bias where the outcomes are immediately apparent (a weather forecast or a sports score). Indeed, almost nobody accuses the New York Times or Fox News Channel of slanting their weather reports.

    3) Less bias occurs when competition produces a healthy tension between a news organization’s desire to conform to audience expectations and maintaining its reputation. ^

    That’s probably not the most complete answer, but this at least addresses media writing. For fiction writing, the answer is similar. Everyone knows we have not produced a single author as great as those from our grandparents’ generation. At the same time, we all have our favorites that speak to our point of view. We’re still waiting for the voice that can unify a generation. And the post you responded to contained a thoughtful analysis of the computer’s effect on technical writing.

  • The Bi-Axial Dilemma in Document Organization. No one can figure out what this guy’s on about.
  • Archimedes codex decoded. Ancient text shows the brilliance of Archimedes, reveals how lonely great minds are.
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