Planetaki Planet Javier Cañada

Phroth is Penn State’s century-old humor magazine. We love...

2010-03-21T00:28:00+00:00

Phroth is Penn State’s century-old humor magazine. We love to make people laugh! Also, we don’t get laid very often.

Hablan los bomberos confundidos con etarras

2010-03-21T00:54:06+00:00

El bombero Óscar Llop resume en unos segundos la situación de las últimas horas. Pasaron "una mala noche" pero se les trató "bien". Leer. Escuchar

Burla a la justicia

2010-03-21T00:55:22+00:00

Las reformas incluidas en la Disposición Final Primera del Anteproyecto de Ley de Economía Sostenible suponen una burla a nuestro sistema judicial.

– David Bravo al CGPJ
#manifiesto

# Enlace Permanente

Vía http://www.flickr.com/photos/xraxo

2010-03-21T00:03:59+00:00

Vía http://www.flickr.com/photos/xraxo

FS: Vostok AMPHIBIA 1967 S/S SPORT BRACELET

2010-03-20T23:17:27+00:00

FS: Vostok AMPHIBIA 1967 S/S SPORT BRACELET (no replies) http://bit.ly/amqUNw. ... Apple · Design · Gadgets · Hardware · Linux/Unix · Microsoft ...

VOSTOK TOZ 35 .22 Match Pistol Parts

2010-03-20T23:17:27+00:00

VOSTOK TOZ 35 .22 Match Pistol Parts. ... PISTOL DESIGN AND PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION. The main characteristics .of the pistol are as follows: ...

do you have charts about how many people ask you if you have charts including the success or faliure of you having the chart they asked for with a side chart of location/ethnicity/obesity levels of the person asking for a chart?

2010-03-21T00:28:00+00:00

I like you. You are funny.

Wall of Death

2010-03-20T21:39:23+00:00

maguisso - Wall of Death

Desastre de Nestlé en su página de Facebook

2010-03-20T22:03:31+00:00

Por si no lo sabían,la mayor parte de esos chocolates baratos que se venden en los kioskos en realidad son casi totalmente manteca vegetal hidrogenada teñida y saborizada como chocolate. En especial, el aceite de palma es tan barato que Nestlé lo usa a destajo para producir su chocolate KitKat. El problema es que para plantar la palmera que produce este aceite, los proveedores de Indonesia están talando el bosque nativo, que de paso es el hábitat de una especie tan amenazada como el Orangután.

Con un tema tan grave sobre la mesa, la gente de márketing y relaciones públicas debió pensarlo mejor antes de crear una Fan Page en Facebook.

Pasa que la internet es un medio sumamente poderoso. Hay grupos de fans completamente triviales que en pocos días consiguen decenas de miles de seguidores. Si no me creen, pregúntenle a Exequiel Plaza -editor de Wayerless y creador de MobileCloseUp- que creó un grupo como experimento y en una semana juntó 44.000 fans.

Así que los encargados de promociones y demases en Nestlé deben haber dicho: “Esto está tirado, es gratis y te llenas de fans, mejora la percepción y difusión de la marca y el directorio nos dará un aumento“. Ese fue su primer error, porque no esperaban que los comentarios tomaran un tono crítico haciendo eco de Greenpeace y otras organizaciones que critican el uso del aceite de Palma. Además, los “fans” más críticos animaban al resto a ponerse como foto de perfil un logo adulterado de Nestlé en donde en vez de “KitKat” se lee “Killer”.

El segundo error fue cuando los mismos funcionarios advirtieron en la página que eliminarían las opiniones de los que usaran ese logo como fotografía, porque violaba su propiedad intelectual. Ahí sí que se desató la debacle y los comentarios críticos se tornaron abiertamente descalificativos del tenor de: “Oye estúpido de RRPP, gracia a ti ahora tenemos un espacio para destruir la imagen de tu empresa a la vista de todos“.

La gente de RRPP ha intentado calmar los ánimos. No ha logrado detener las críticas pero sí cambiarlas a un tono menos insultante. Lo importante es que este es un desastre de relaciones públicas y tanto Nestlé como cualquier empresa que tenga tejado de vidrio en un frente sensible debieran aprender la lección.

De paso, por si les picó la curiosidad, les comento que deben pinchar en “sólo fans” para leer los comentarios.

Link: Nestle mess shows sticky side of Facebook pages (CNET)

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nestle/40098149066

http://www.planetaki.com - such a nice web app!!! like threadsy but for websites or blogs you follow!

2010-03-20T22:38:39+00:00

http://www.planetaki.com - such a nice web app!!! like threadsy but for websites or blogs you follow!

Lake Vostok 6227 http://ticoscoop.net/index.php?search=Lake+Vostok

2010-03-20T23:17:02+00:00

Lake Vostok 6227 http://ticoscoop.net/index.php?search=Lake+Vostok

Periodic Table of Sci-Fi

2010-03-21T00:28:00+00:00

Periodic Table of Sci-Fi

SEX

2010-03-20T21:42:12+00:00

The shape of things to come (I&II)

Photo

2010-03-20T21:21:37+00:00

And now for something completely different

2010-03-20T21:37:29+00:00

And now for something completely different es la frase con la que John Cleese daba inicio al programa de la BBC Monty Python Flying Circus. Cada vez que la oigo sé que voy a pasar un buen rato riendo y sonriendo. Los estoy revisitando desde hace unas semanas y, sin lugar a dudas, ver uno de sus episodios es la mejor manera de acabar el día.

Bonus: Además de ser unos genios del humor y la televisión, son unos tíos despiertos. Cuando se dieron cuenta de que la gente subía sus vídeos a Youtube, abrieron un canal, lo llenaron de contenido, y establecieron una relación muy positiva con un público deseoso de conseguir más material. Finalmente, esta maniobra les salió muy rentable no sólo en términos de imagen, si no también económicamente. El anuncio que usaron es simplemente genial.

EARL COOPER | AUTO RACING LEGENDS AT THE DAWN OF THE GOLDEN AGE

2010-03-20T21:08:58+00:00

Earl Cooper, auto racer, taken at the auto races at Salem, New Hampshire. Cooper’s last major victory was here at the Rockingham board track speedway. He won that 200-miler with a front-drive Miller in 1926. – Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS— Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

Nebraska-born in 1886, Earl Cooper became a star just as the Golden Age of auto racing was dawning. Cooper’s illustrious racing career, in which he racked-up three National Championships (1913, 1915 & 1917) and 11 top 10 points finishes, all started in 1904– in an ironic and bittersweet twist.

It was 1904, and Cooper was on the West Coast working as a mechanic at a Maxwell auto dealership. Cooper was bitten by the racing bug, but when he appealed to the Maxwell dealership for sponsorship in a San Francisco race, he was refused. Turns-out his own boss was competing in the same race and did not welcome the friendly competition. So Cooper scoffed at the dealership’s snub, and somehow was able to convince a kind old woman to let him enter her brand new Maxwell in the race. Cooper soundly beat his boss– and just as quick, found himself unemployed. With nothing left to lose, he went on a racing tear, up and down the West Coast, where he was at times unstoppable.

Cooper joined the Stutz racing team in 1912, and just one year later went on to win the National Championship– racking up 2,610 points. Cooper dominated the scene that year, winning five of the eight major road races, along with one 2nd place finish.

Earl Cooper and his riding mechanic in the Stutz car. Picture taken at Indianapolis 500 qualifying in 1919. (Indianapolis Motor Speedway photo. Noel Allard collection)

In 1913, Cooper’s Hell-bent rival, Barney Oldfield, was driving for the Mercer team. The two battled fast and furious in a battle of skill and will on the track–

Cooper and Oldfield would run head-to-head at the Santa Monica Road Race, held on an eight-mile macadam course near the ocean. Oldfield blasted away from the starter’s flag and held a sizeable lead, but Cooper passed Tetzlaff for second and began running Oldfield down. With a 4-minute lead over Oldfield, one of Cooper’s tires blew out and he had to coast into the pits. As his riding mechanic struggled to get the wheel off, Oldfield roared past. Cooper jumped out of the driver’s seat and wrenched the wheel off, the tire was changed and the car back on the track to begin running down Oldfield once more. In his exuberance to stay ahead, this time Oldfield blew a tire and bumped into the pits as Cooper whisked past and on to the checkered flag as the winner.

On September 9, 1913, Cooper and Oldfield again met head-to-head on a 3-mile paved track that circled the town of Corona, California. Cooper, after experiencing the tire problem at Santa Monica, had cannily practiced on the course to find what maximum speed he could drive in order to not make any tire stops at all. He determined that if he drove 75 mph. for the entire race, he could do just that. Oldfield, hell-bent-for-leather, predicted that the race average would go to 90 mph. Oldfield set the pace from the start, over Cooper, Tetzlaff, DePalma and Spencer Wishart. He clocked an awesome 98 mph on one lap, but the track had started to break up from the pounding it was taking from the heavy cars. Oldfield burst a tire and Cooper inherited the lead. Oldfield was back on the track and again at speed when again, a young spectator ran onto the track in front of him. Oldfield swerved to avoid the lad and crashed heavily, injuring several people and himself. Cooper won again and would go on to take his first AAA National Championship.

–Noel Allard

Earl Cooper in action at the start of a race in 1925, Laurel, Maryland.

1915 was another banner year, as Cooper battled back from health issues that had kept him largely sidelined in 1914. He won the first race of 1915 at Point Loma, California, then was forced to take time off from racing due to his health for the early part of the season. He scored points at Indianapolis with a 4th place finish, along with another 4th place finish at Maywood, IL, and two 2nd place finishes at Tacoma, WA. Cooper also managed 2nd in a 50-lap invitational on the Chicago board track. He followed that with a win in one of two events at Elgin, IL, and at a 500-mile race on the cement speedway at Fort Snelling, MN, outside Minneapolis. He also won three 100-mile non-points-awarding races in the West to close the season.

On May 26, 1925, Earl Cooper became the first driver to exceed 110 mph at the famed speedway in Indianapolis when he drove his Junior 8 to 110.728 mph in an official qualification lap. The record didn’t last long. He was eclipsed later in the day by Harry Hartz with a speed of 112.994 mph and again the same day by Peter DePaolo at 114.285 mph in a Duesenberg.

He also set a four-lap qualifying record at 110.487 mph in 1925, but was topped by Hartz, DePaolo and eventual pole sitter Leon Duray in a Miller at 113.196 mph.

Earl Cooper’s impressive racing career lasted until 1927. But retirement did not mean an end to racing– Cooper spent several years as a team manager. Along with his loyal mechanic over the years, Reeves Dutton, they built three front-drive Cooper racing cars, one of which competed at Indianapolis into the 1940s. Earl Cooper died on Oct. 22, 1965 in Atwater, CA, at the age of 79.

San Francisco, California — Photo shows auto racing legend Earl Cooper of San Francisco at the race at Rochingham. — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

To be continued…

IMAX Hubble 3D

2010-03-20T22:03:31+00:00

La NASA se unió con la Corporación IMAX y Warner Bros. Pictures para llevar a cabo una película en la que se documenta la misión STS-125 del transbordador Atlantis, cuya finalidad era realizar una serie de trabajos para mejorar el telescopio espacial Hubble.

A bordo del transbordador viajaron cámaras IMAX 3-D, utilizadas para registrar en detalle las cinco caminatas espaciales realizadas por los astronautas, permitiendo obtener impresionantes tomas del trabajo realizado.

La tripulación del Atlantis fue entrenada para lograr operar este tipo de cámaras, mientras que durante la misión tuvieron que realizar tanto sus labores habituales de astronautas en el espacio, como de cineastas encargados de filmar esta histórica misión.

El estreno de la película se realizó el día de ayer en las salas habilitadas con la tecnología IMAX, con seguridad quienes puedan asistir a una de estas funciones disfrutarán de una experiencia que los acercará al espacio de una forma nunca antes vista.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Links:

Chile: CrisisCamp en vivo

2010-03-20T22:03:31+00:00

Si no has podido asistir al CrisisCamp que se realiza en Chile en ayuda a las víctimas del terremoto del 27 de febrero, puedes verlo en directo a través de la transmisión que se estará realizando todo el día y que te dejamos después del salto.

El evento se realiza en el zócalo de la Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad de Chile (Beauchef 850, Santiago), desde las 9:00 a las 18:00 horas.

Live video by Ustream

Link: ChileAyuda

Time Line: Ghost Whisperer episode

2010-03-20T21:10:24+00:00

Time Line: Ghost Whisperer episode

Socialistas canarios deciden sustituto de Aguilar

2010-03-21T00:54:06+00:00

Finalmente son dos candidatos -Manuel Marcos Pérez y José Miguel Pérez-, después de que Díaz Tejera se retirase para prestar respaldo al primero. Leer. Escuchar

In GIS as in economics, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing (Zimbabwe edition)

2010-03-20T22:10:42+00:00

I'm always interested when the (mis)management of human affairs leads to large-scale effects visible from space. This blog has documented several such cases, from depopulation policies in Burma and Zimbabwe to massive refugee camps in Chad and a polluting mine on Indonesia's West Papua.

I was therefore excited when I noticed that Alex Tabarrok in Marginal Revolution — one of my favorite economics blogs — had written up the use of Google Earth imagery to examine the large-scale effect of Mugabe's land redistribution policy on Zimbabwean farmland.

Tabarrok's post is about an article by the economist Craig J. Richardson entitled Visual Evidence of the Cost of Destroying Property Rights, likely published in late 2006 (no date is given) on the website of The Center for Global Development (CGD), a Washington DC think tank. (I'm surprised I hadn't seen the article before, but perhaps this is due to the fact that it was not ever in an RSS feed.) The article's intention is to illustrate with before-and-after satellite imagery from Google Earth what happened when, beginning in 2000, white-owned commercial farmland was redistributed to poor and landless Zimbabweans. The apparent moral of the story is that the tragedy of the commons is an all too predictable outcome when property rights are destroyed:

Instead of improving [the farmland], the move towards equality has had ironic results: [The] commercial farming sector now increasingly resembles the communal lands. The once irrigated commercial land is brown and scorched, and the reservoirs have dried up due to a lack of parts.

The presentation is given its own section on CGD's website, introduced by
Scorched Earth in Zimbabwe: Before and After Satellite Photos and including a page dedicated to a discussion of the satellite imagery used.

CGD even produced a Flash animation to highlight the changes: (Click on the arrow to progress between before and after photos)

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tabarrok's post resulted in a long and interesting comment thread that even includes an appearance by Richardson, the original article's author.

There is unfortunately one fundamental error in Richardson's empirical research, one that has little to do with his skills as an economist but everything to do with his lack of skills as a forensic neogeographer:

His before-and-after images are derived from the same original raw Landsat image. They are from the same point in time.

There is no doubt about it. Here's why:

The base imagery in Google Earth is 15m-per-pixel Landsat imagery, and it can be over a decade old. The imagery in Richardson's presentation was indeed the base imagery visible in Google Earth during 2005 and 2006, before any high-resolution imagery was added for that region.

But Google routinely updates its imagery dataset, and when it does so, it is not uncommon for different post-processing settings to be applied to the same base imagery, to better match colors across regions.

It is the case that colors in satellite imagery are always false, albeit made to look realistic (just as with those pretty pictures of galaxies and planets). A lake captured on a raw satellite image may have the vaguest grayish-blueish tint, but then the saturation, hue and vibrancy are typically tweaked so that we get a bright blue color in the final image. The same goes for grasslands, fields and forests. Very slight color changes reflecting different crop choices can lead to drastically different hues by the time the image hits Google Earth.

So how do I know that these two images are the same, albeit post-processed differently, as opposed to taken a few years apart, as posited by Richardson? Because the composition of the fields, like the outlines of pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, is identical. All the fallow fields in one image are fallow in the other. Not a single field has been tilled, planted, harvested, abandoned, burned or overgrown, in whole or in part, in the supposed interval.

As anybody who's stared long enough at satellite images knows, the state of the fields is like a fingerprint. If they match, the images match. The main difference between these two identical images is that one is yellower than the other, and that in one the blue hues have been turned way up, while in the other they have not. Instead of scorched earth and dried up reservoirs, we have two different post-processing settings.

One eagle-eyed commenter, in addition to noticing that these images are identical, pointed out that there are some cloning artifacts at the bottom of the images (and he is right, with a gallery to prove it). I do not, however, think that the images were doctored with the intention to deceive. Rather, as thumbnails of Richardson's originals hint, the author likely wanted to erase the Google logo and the compass from the presentation.

The main problem, however, is that this unfortunate revelation makes a mockery of Richardson's main empirical point in support of his thesis, which is that post land reform, the reservoirs ran dry by 2006, just because they looked yellow in Google Earth in 2006.

There is an easy way to see that the reservoirs were not dry in 2006: Launch Google Earth and take a look for yourself.

Today, Google Earth not only has high-resolution imagery for the area of Richardson's imagery, the latest version of the application also boasts a historical timeline that can show older satellite imagery. As it happens, Google Earth has 2.5m Spot Image imagery for the whole area taken on October 5, 2005, and better-than-1m GeoEye imagery for part of the area taken on October 7, 2006.

Because I realize not everybody is fluent in Google Earth, you can follow along with me. Just download this file to your desktop and open it in Google Earth (download the application here). It shows you the exact area in question, bounded by a white rectangle.

Notice that the easternmost third of the rectangle is in a different hue. That is the newer GeoEye imagery from Oct 2006. The western two thirds is Spot Image imagery, taken almost exactly a year earlier:

(Click to see full-resolution version.)

Take a moment to observe the reservoirs. They are not "dried up".

You can strip away the newer imagery by using the historical imagery timeline. Click on the clock icon in the toolbar at the top of the screen — a timeline appears. Shift the slider to the left, to the next-most recent view, from June 4, 2007. The GeoEye imagery from Oct 2006 disappears, because it had not yet been added to Google Earth on June 4, 2007.

(Click to see full-resolution version.)

If you zoom in on any lake in the eastern third of the rectangle, you can now toggle between its state in Oct 2005 and Oct 2006, simply by dragging the slider back and forth between June 4, 2007 and the present day. You'll notice that the reservoir levels in Oct 2005 are somewhat higher than in Oct 2006.

Explore this easternmost area and toggle the slider some more. Notice something strange? Many of the shallow valleys, which are slightly more wooded, seem to have been burned between Oct 2005 and Oct 2006. There is a very clear example of this at the area where I've placed a pin in the Google Earth file:

Oct 5, 2005 imagery (Click to see full-resolution version.)

Oct 7, 2006 imagery (Click to see full-resolution version.)

Here's a close-up:

Oct 5, 2005 imagery (Click to see full-resolution version.)

Oct 7, 2006 imagery (Click to see full-resolution version.)

Now that we have all this evidence in place, this much is clear: Tabarrok should pull the PowerPoint slides he made incorporating CGD's interactive graphic, because they do not show that Mugabe's land reforms led to a tragedy of the commons. The reforms may well have done so, but CGD's graphic, being based on a single image, cannot show this.

(Also worth mentioning is a point raised by some of the commenters, which is that the land repossessed from white land-owners was not in the main given to poor or landless farmers, but to Mugabe's cronies, who are as likely to be competent at farming as they are at governing Zimbabwe. So even if there were a discernible worsening of the farmland previously owned by white farmers, it would not illustrate the tragedy of the commons so much as the tragedy of cronyism.)

One thing we may not conclude, however, is that Richardson is wrong just because the evidence he used to support his thesis was false. In his comment to Tabarrok's post, Richardson writes something very interesting:

Lastly, I have photos from my visits to Zimbabwe that document thousands of acres of burned fields- former commercial farmland- that were torched so that starving people could eat the wild game that hid there. Ironically the fields were worth more burned to the ground after the titles were revoked.

This would certainly be one plausible explanation for the extensive burning of the fields and shallow valleys visible in the Oct 2006 imagery above. It is quite likely that we do, after all, have here an instance of a large-scale effect visible from space due to the (mis)management of human affairs — just not the one Richardson had in mind — supporting Richardson's thesis that the destruction of property rights leads to the tragedy of the commons.

Comments (0)

Content: Not Always King

2010-03-20T22:28:35+00:00

There has been a lot of discussion over the last year around content strategy, the discipline of analyzing, managing, planning, and focusing content, particularly on the web. This is a good thing, as we’re nearly two decades into the commercial web and many organizations have built up a huge, unconsidered blob of content that needs to be sorted out.

Content strategy is all well and good, of course, but it has brought with it the rallying cry of “Content First!” and a million articles about how “Content is King.” Content is king…except when it’s not.

Broadly speaking, there is a continuum of products from those that are content-rich to those that don’t contain any “content” (aside from semantic) at all. CNN.com on one side, a spoon on the other. If we exclude those products that don’t deal with content at all (and there are a significant number of those), we’re left with products that are about content consumption on one side of the continuum, and products that are about content creation and manipulation on the other. TiVo on one side, Microsoft Office on the other. In the middle are products like Flickr or Twitter, which are about the distribution of content, and include a blend of creation and consumption.

The strategy you adopt when tackling a project needs to take this continuum in mind. If your product is about content consumption, content is king and you should do due diligence and start from a content strategy perspective. Users of those products are coming to be informed or entertained and need the content to be front-and-center; the product is in service to displaying the content in as appropriate a manner as possible. The meaning of the content matters; you wouldn’t display a cartoon the same way you’d display an analysis of the stock market. At least, not usually.

But on the other end of the continuum, on the content creation and manipulation side, you do yourself a disservice by focusing on the content and not instead on the activities people need to perform with the content. Of course, you can’t dismiss the type of content that is being worked with. To record and edit a video clip requires different tasks than creating a presentation or spreadsheet. But for content creation products, interaction with the content is king, not the content itself. Unlike products about content consumption, the meaning of the content doesn’t much matter. I can create a Word document about the Holocaust just as I would about how to play snooker. The activities supported are the same.

Obviously, there is nuance to this: Hollywood movies aren’t put together the same way your home movies are, but for the most part, content is not king, because it’s not about the information/data/story that is being conveyed, but about how that content, whatever it is, is being made and adjusted. Content is a type of container into which meaning can be poured. (Of course, the created pieces of content can then be placed into a product for content consumption, the same way this article (written on Ecto, a desktop text editor and thus a content creation product) will eventually be placed on the Kicker Studio blog (a product for content consumption).

If, with content strategy, you begin with a content analysis to figure out what raw materials you have to work with, with products for content creation you should start with an understanding of the feature set, what activities need to be designed for so that a correct interaction model can be designed. Begin with a feature (task) analysis that always asks, Why do we need this feature? in the same way the the best content strategy asks Why does this need to be published?

So before you immediately jump to Content First!, ask yourself, what is the role of content in this product: is the content filled with meaning to be consumed, a social object, or a container for meaning? How you answer that question is the first step in determining what approach to take when designing a product that deals with content, and whether or not Content is King.

Firefox, el arma definitiva

2010-03-20T21:40:06+00:00

Herido grave un soldado en Ceuta al volcar un carr

2010-03-20T21:35:58+00:00

La Comandancia General de Ceuta ha abierto una investigación para esclarecer las causas del suceso. Leer. Escuchar

via deanminifie gamefreaksnz: Infographic: The Power of the...

2010-03-20T21:10:23+00:00

via deanminifie

gamefreaksnz:

Infographic: The Power of the Death Star vs. Power of the Force