After they wrote, they tweeted and facebooked and flogged their blogs, and because they were good, and worked hard, within a year or two, magazines asked them to affiliate (on financial terms that were insulting), but they did that, and their blogs got an audience, and then they got magazine assignments, then agents, then book deals, and now, three, four years after they began, these folks, five or six of them, are beginning to break through. They are becoming not just science writers with jobs, they are becoming THE science writers, the ones people read, and look to… they’re going places. And they’re doing it on their own terms! In their own voice, they’re free to be themselves AND they’re paid for it!

"Just as neurons interconnect in networks that create structured thoughts beyond the ken of any individual neuron, so people spontaneously organize themselves into groups to create emergent organizations that no individual may intend, comprehend, or even perceive. ... two experimental paradigms in which we attempt to build predictive bridges between the beliefs, goals, and cognitive capacities of individuals and patterns of behavior at the group level, showing how the members of a group dynamically allocate themselves to resources and how innovations diffuse through a social network. Agent-based computational models have provided useful explanatory and predictive accounts. Together, the models and experiments point to tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation—that is, compromises between individuals using their own innovations and using innovations obtained from their peers—and the emergence of group-level organizations..."

I will give this a fair shot, but the abstract is not promising at all.  A great fit to the one-factor model is, after all, precisely what you should expect if there are really an immense number of factors, but your measurement procedures are all crap and depend on random subsets of them.  (Perhaps I need to turn http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html into a proper paper after all.)

"[...] a reconstruction of the first 10,000 wikipedia contributions, roughly wikipedia's first six weeks [...]"

"We have huge, naïve ambitions to change the world. Like most start-ups, we'll probably be an abject failure.

We seek a designer to join us in our likely-futile goals. For the time that the company manages to avoid drowning in the the deadpool, we'll work with you on creating a would-be beautiful website for our fundamentally ill-conceived product.

... We seek a mediocre designer who is regularly frustrated by their inability to make things that are as good as they should be to help us. We'd like somebody who writes <b> instead of <B>, but not someone who writes, say, <strong>. We'd like someone who isn't all "durrrr" when they look at Photoshop, but we'd prefer someone who typically inflicts their general averageness on HTML instead of graphic design."

Citizen monitoring of bats, birds, & invasives: bookmarks tagged "citizen-science" by @dgovoni./@michael_nielsen

Nice detailed piece on how genomes are sequenced.

"A question that seems almost too obvious to ask is: "why did the Web have the impact that it did?" What was it that the Web provided that had been missing before? My answer is that the Web wrapped content in a network service, the service of providing access to it. Absent HTTP, the network service that provides access, HTML would have been just another document format. The key was to encapsulate content in this and other formats inside Web servers, providing the network service of accessing them.

Because preservation has focused on the content (the HTML), and not on the service (the HTTP), it hasn't been either effective or cost-effective....

When what scholars wanted to publish was "papers", that is static articles, monographs and books, the problems caused by preserving only the content and not the service could be ignored. But this is just an artifact of the new medium of the Web starting out by emulating paper, the old medium it was supplanting."

a multi-spectral look at the milky way.

"trying to save local bookstores from otherwise predictably fatal competition by turning some customers into members, patrons, or donors is an observably crazy idea. However, if the sober-minded alternative is waiting for the Justice Department to anoint the American Booksellers Association as a kind of OPEC for ink, even crazy ideas may be worth a try." -- My recollection is that the late lamented Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor looked into doing something like this, but found the legal obstacles insuperable.

"The companion blog by the authors (Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass) of the upcoming O'Reilly book: Building Web Reputation Systems."

"(I find that bloggers hardly ever suffer from this problem. In many ways the core of blogging is a willingness to apply what you know to every problem you encounter, and see how good a job you can do of it in a more or less integrated fashion.)"

"you don't want to be in the position of having an idiot boss, quitting your job, working for yourself, and discovering that your new boss is an even bigger idiot."

"Why do these asinine reports jump onto a bandwagon they don’t understand and why do those reporting on them relate with such glee that a service that was never supposed in the first place to be more than gossipy tittle-tattle and proudly banal verbal doodling is “failing to deliver meaningful commercial or political content”. Bollocky bollocks to the lot of them. They can found their own “enterprise oriented” earnest microblogging service. Remind me to avoid it."

'it is a long-term goal of arxiv to accurately identify and disambiguate all authors of all articles in arxiv. such identification would provide accurate results for queries such as "show me all the other papers by the particular john smith that wrote this paper", something that can be done only approximately with text-based searches. it would also permit construction of an author-article graph which is useful for relevance assessment and bibliometric analysis.'