47% of defendants in Brooklyn Criminal Court are non-citizens
Source: Conrad
Tags: law collateral consequences demographics
Added: 2012-03-15T12:16:10Z by anders
complicated grief

when someone who has experienced a loss gets stuck in the grief process

Source: thursday morning meeting
Tags: psychology grief
Added: 2012-03-15T12:14:50Z by anders
algorithmic drug interaction research

They developed an algorithm that would match data from each drug-exposed patient to a nonexposed control patient with the same condition. The approach automatically corrected for several known sources of bias, including those linked to gender, age and disease.

The team then used this method to compile a database of 1,332 drugs and possible side effects that were not listed on the labels for those drugs. The algorithm came up with an average of 329 previously unknown adverse events for each drug.

Tags: pharmacology drugs side-effects medicine science
Added: 2012-03-15T11:38:00Z by anders
Colony Collapse linked to corn insecticide

Since seed coating with neonicotinoid insecticides was introduced in the late 1990s, European beekeepers have reported severe colony losses in the period of corn sowing (spring). As a consequence, seed-coating neonicotinoid insecticides that are used worldwide on corn crops have been blamed for honeybee decline.

Tags: bees insecticide environment colony collapse
Added: 2012-03-15T11:08:25Z by anders
Amazon Web Services is using at least 450,000 servers

a researcher estimates that Amazon Web Services is using at least 454,400 servers in seven data center hubs around the globe.

Tags: cloud aws amazon data centers
Added: 2012-03-14T22:36:30Z by anders
Ineffectiveness of pre-exercise stretching

According to a review by McHugh and Cosgrave in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine in Science in Sports (2009), stretching right before acutely impairs muscle strength and does not affect the incidence of overuse injuries. The evidence is mixed as to whether it affects risk injury.

Tags: stretching exercise injury
Added: 2012-03-14T22:00:10Z by anders
A Support Vector Machine finds a linear plane with maximum margin to separate two classes of output

Categorical input can be turned into numeric input as before and categorical output can be modeled as multiple binary output.

The strength of SVM is it can handle large number of dimensions. With the kernel function, it can handle non-linear relationship as well.

Tags: machine learning support vector machines programming
Added: 2012-03-14T14:43:53Z by anders
DNS pre-fetching in Chrome causes intermittent failures in some cheap NAS routers

  1. If DNS prefetching is enabled, after browsing some pages for a while (every half an hour aproximately), my internet connection gets reset.
  2. If it is disabled, everything works fine.

Tags: chrome networking routers dns
Added: 2012-03-14T14:37:33Z by anders
Bubbling vs Capturing browser events

W3C’s DOM Level 2 Events API specifies two phases for events: capturing and bubbling. The third argument to the addEventListener method lets you specify which phase you’re concerned with when you register to be notified of events on an element.

Tags: javascript dom performance
Added: 2012-03-14T14:33:05Z by anders
Obama's childhood nanny was transgendered
Source: USATODAY.com
Tags: obama gender politics
Added: 2012-03-14T14:19:56Z by anders
virtualenv will be included in a future Python release

In about two minutes, discussion on PEP 405 came and went. Carl Meyer mentioned that a reference implementation is available and is working pretty well.

Tags: python virtualenv
Added: 2012-03-14T14:15:14Z by anders
Microsoft Azure experienced downtime due to a leap year bug

When the GA creates the transfer certificate, it gives it a one year validity range. It uses midnight UST of the current day as the valid-from date and one year from that date as the valid-to date. The leap day bug is that the GA calculated the valid-to date by simply taking the current date and adding one to its year. That meant that any GA that tried to create a transfer certificate on leap day set a valid-to date of February 29, 2013, an invalid date that caused the certificate creation to fail.

Tags: software engineering availability cloud services azure leap year
Added: 2012-03-14T14:06:33Z by anders
Five Hat Racks

Term for five fundamental ways of organizing information: category, time, location, alphabet, and continuum.

Tags: design information architecture
Added: 2012-03-14T09:21:10Z by anders
Zebra Camouflage

Zebra’s stripes aren’t to disguise it against the background foliage, etc. but to make it harder for a predator to distinguish and target individuals in the herd.

Tags: design camouflage zebras perception
Added: 2012-03-14T09:15:48Z by anders
Horror Vacui

A tendency to fill blank spaces with objects. Opposite of minimalism.

Tags: design minimalism
Added: 2012-03-14T09:11:46Z by anders
Django and Python 3

Django 1.5 will begin to experimentally support Python 3. Python 2.6 will be the minimum requirement.

Tags: django python python3
Added: 2012-03-13T23:59:23Z by anders
MRSA strain formed from farm drug exposure

“acquired resistance as a result of farm drug exposure”

Tags: epidemiology pharmacology mrsa factory farming
Added: 2012-03-13T21:21:07Z by anders
Parasite Single

a Japanese term for a single person who lives with their parents beyond their late twenties in order to enjoy a carefree and comfortable life.

Tags: japanese sociology culture
Added: 2012-03-13T14:33:20Z by anders
mediawiki syntax is never converted to a parse tree

it’s a sequence of regular expression search and replace operations that convert it directly to HTML that are run repeatedly over each others output, plus a bunch more logic written directly in PHP.

Tags: parsing mediawiki syntax
Added: 2012-03-13T14:24:27Z by anders
globally declining birthrates

half the world’s population lives in countries with birthrates below the replacement level.

Source: NYT
Tags: demographics birthrate
Added: 2012-03-13T11:00:27Z by anders