PTV (a television network in Pakistan) did a half-hour feature on some of my grandfather’s films. Lots of black and white film acting and dancing can be found within. You can make the family connection in the fact that at one point a grown man cries, wails and gestures using a chicken he’s holding in his hands.
Nasim Haider Shah interview for PTV about Haider Shah from Sajid Qureshi on Vimeo.
Aircraft carrier USS Enterprise at Ford Island in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in late May 1942, being readied for the Battle of Midway. (U.S. Navy)
— In Focus – World War II: Battle of Midway and the Aleutian Campaign
The wonderful Screened.com has put up a compilation video of every death in the Final Destination series. I’ve not seen a single one, and had no idea it was so gory.
On my commute to the office yesterday I saw a link to a feature being run by The Atlantic called The Great Jobs Debate: Ideas for how to put the unemployed back to work. In their words, they’ve “brought together some of the top minds in business, government, and the world of ideas, each to answer the same question: What is the single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation?”
There are some good ideas and some bad ideas, mostly depending on what your personal ideology is. Personally, I thought these two were great:
Megan McArdle: Create a Special Job Credit for the Long-Term Unemployed
How to get employers to hire people who have already been out of work for too long? Traditional government solutions like job training have an absolutely dismal record. The only government solution to long-term unemployment we’ve ever found was to have World War II, and for various reasons, we’re probably not going to reauthorize that particular program.
One suggestion is to give them direct incentives to choose the long-term unemployed over those who are already in work, or out of work for only a short time. How? We could exempt new hires from both the employee and the employer sides of the payroll tax, one month for every month that they were unemployed.
The result is a direct wage subsidy of more than 10%. But it is a time-limited subsidy, and one carefully targeted to those who need it the most. By the time the tax relief expires, these workers will have been reintegrated into the labor force. This will cost the government something of course–but not nearly as much as supporting them on welfare, disability, or early retirement–or the prison system.
Mike Haynie: Unlock Capital for Small Business
The United States should create a national microlending program positioned to provide ready access to capital to small business. It is widely acknowledged that small business represents the engine of job creation in this country. Small business accounts for approximately 50 percent of all private-sector jobs, and roughly 70 percent of all new jobs created in the past decade.
In today’s environment, banks have much less incentive to extend a traditional small-business loan ($5,000 to $25,000), because the relationship between the transaction costs associated with processing that loan and the return on that investment to the bank often doesn’t make economic sense. It’s all about opportunity cost.
For example, consider that the transaction costs associated with processing a $10,000 loan to a small business and a $5 million loan to a large business are roughly the same. Also recognize that the return on investment to the bank (that is, the interest paid on the loan) increases proportionally with the size of the loan–the larger the loan, the more interest income generated relative to the “cost” of issuing and servicing the loan. Therefore, whether you are a large public bank with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders or a small credit union responsible to its membership, there is an incentive to focus on larger and thus more profitable loans. Banks are in business to make a profit.
Research highlights that most small businesses, especially over the first five years of operation, require only small and incremental infusions of capital to sustain positive growth. A national microlending program positioned to provide capital infusions of $1,000-$20,000 to small business–created as a partnership between government and community-based lenders–would represent an compelling channel for small businesses to access start-up and growth capital.
I’ve heard people reference this study a number of times recently and finally decided to track it down. For an expanded explanation of Mr. Putnam’s findings, see his article E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century.
Boston.com – The downside of diversity
It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.
But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.
“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.
The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation’s social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam’s research predicts.
“We can’t ignore the findings,” says Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “The big question we have to ask ourselves is, what do we do about it; what are the next steps?”
The study is part of a fascinating new portrait of diversity emerging from recent scholarship. Diversity, it shows, makes us uncomfortable — but discomfort, it turns out, isn’t always a bad thing. Unease with differences helps explain why teams of engineers from different cultures may be ideally suited to solve a vexing problem. Culture clashes can produce a dynamic give-and-take, generating a solution that may have eluded a group of people with more similar backgrounds and approaches. At the same time, though, Putnam’s work adds to a growing body of research indicating that more diverse populations seem to extend themselves less on behalf of collective needs and goals.
Chart courtesy of Suresh Kumar. I don’t believe the relationship to em is correct in all cases, but the rest is quite useful.
Back in 2007 I wrote a BlackBerry OS application to perform a simple e-mail routing health check procedure. It turned out to be a hellish process, and not just for the fact that I’m not much of a Java developer (I don’t include Java in my list of skills on my resume). That was a minor problem compared to the overly involved process that had to be undertaken in order to simply compile the damn app and deploy it to a handheld for testing. On top of all that, Research In Motion at that time required that any developer who wished to use certain parts of their API, even just to test on their own device, to register at the cost of $200 USD. My employer paid this fee on my behalf, but it capped off an unpleasant process.
Times have changed and RIM has learned a few lessons. Developers no longer have to pay RIM merely for the pleasure of developing an app, but they do still face an unclear process for deploying to a test device. For both my own sake and for other developers, I’ve attempted to do a comprehensive write up of the process of deploying a BlackBerry WebWorks app to a PlayBook tablet. It consists of ten rather involved steps, but after the first time you do it once the process shrinks down to just the two last steps.
All right – let’s both take a deep breath and get started.
While it’s very likely that the BlackBerry PlayBook will receive a native Twitter client in the near future, without an official release date, owners of the PlayBook are left to look to third party developers to fill the gap. At the present time, only two options exist: Tweedless by Mikko Haapoja and Blaq by Kisai Labs.
Tweedless, available free of charge, is a (nearly) fully-featured Twitter client for the PlayBook, with the five icons in the top-right corner of the user interface dedicated to the Home screen (all tweets), Direct Messages, Mentions, Compose Tweet and Compose Direct Message.
What differentiates Tweedless from other Twitter applications – and is the primary manner in which the author describing it – is a Twitter app that “helps you separate the signal from the noise.” In practice, this has a third of Tweedless’s UI dedicated to a “User Filter”, where the selection of one or more of the accounts you are following allows you to view only those tweets. Tweedless keeps track of the number of times you select an account, and over time “automatically sorts who you interact with most” – permanently moving those users to the top of your list for easier selection in the future. The User Filter can be swapped (using the selector at the bottom right) to a Content Filter, allowing you to view only tweets with images, videos or links in them.
The five icons in the top-right corner of the user interface dedicated to the Home screen (all tweets), Direct Messages, Mentions, Compose Tweet and Compose Direct Message. Finally, actions you can take upon a tweet (mention, retweet, direct message or view profile) can be taken dragging your finger to the right upon a user’s profile icon to reveal a set of buttons for those purposes.
Despite the innovative interface, I find using Tweedless an uphill challenge due to three factors:
First, the absence of lists in Tweedless is a huge detractor to my Twitter experience, and is the reason I can’t in good conscience refer to Tweedless as a full-featured Twitter client. I use lists to group the accounts I follow by topic (News, Finance, Software Development) in order to bring context to the tweets I am looking at – User Filters and Content Filters can help compensate, but only partially or awkwardly.
Second, the profile icons pulled in by Tweedless appear to be sized on the small size and scaled up as needed, making the entire application look less crisp than we know is possible.
Thirdly and most detrimentally to the use of the application is that the scrolling motion in the application is somewhat broken. Dragging your finger across a list of tweets moves the list too slowly, a quick swipe upwards or downwards to view the next page of tweets instead sends you down two or three pages worth instead. There is no industry standard for expectations of what a slow or fast swipe will do on a touchscreen device, but the current behaviour is unusable. This, even more than the lack of lists, led me to investigate what the other options were for Twitter clients on the PlayBook.
Blaq ($1.99 USD) comes to the table with a terrific and truly complete list of features: Lists, username auto-completion, profile viewing, in-app website and photo previews and even embed.ly support. The user interface is fairly traditional, with a 50/50 split between the timeline and a compose tweet input box. Icons to view the Home Screen, Mentions, Direct Messages, Lists, Compose Direct Message and Refresh Tweets are located in the bottom right corner and are easily accessed with your right thumb.
While Blaq gets many of the essentials right, one minor and one major fault mar the value of this application. The minor issue is the way that the edge of the tab that slides out as you look at a Web/photo preview or a profile overlaps the main timeline, making a couple of characters in each unreadable. The major issue is that the current version being sold on App World, 1.0.6, is completely missing the Direct Messages, Lists and Compose Direct Message functionality – clicking any of those icons is unresponsive. At the current time, Kisai Labs has not communicated an ETA on a fix via their blog or Twitter account.
Despite having at least half of its expected functionality completely broken, at just $1.99 USD Blaq is for the moment the Twitter application of choice for the BlackBerry PlayBook, especially if you have faith that Kisai Labs will expedite a fix to correct these issues. Having to deal with situations like these is a bit of an indictment of the current state of development on the PlayBook, but it is my hope that the positives of the platform prevail and better options present themselves to its loyal users.
Notes for surviving the apocalypse in style:
Celsias.com – A Refrigerator that Runs Without Electricity
From a family of pot-makers, Mohammed has made ingeniously simple use of the laws of thermodynamics to create the pot-in-pot refrigerator, called a Zeer in Arabic.
Here’s how it works.
You take two earthen pots, both being the same shape but different sizes, and put one within the other. Then, fill the space between the two pots with sand before pouring water into the same cavity to make the sand wet. Then, place food items into the inner pot, and cover with a lid or damp cloth. You only need to ensure the pot-in-pot refrigerator is kept in a dry, well-ventilated space; the laws of thermodynamics does the rest. As the moisture in the sand evaporates, it draws heat away from the inner pot, cooling its contents. The only maintenance required is the addition of more water, around twice a day.
To give an idea of its performance, spinach that would normally wilt within hours in the African heat will last around twelve days in the pot, and items like tomatoes and peppers that normally struggle to survive a few days, now last three weeks. Aubergines (eggplants) get a life extension from just a few days to almost a month.
