ashley

You didn't mention the libraries in your NLP pipeline (guessing NLTK bc of the Python?), but if you're doing LSM compatibility, I'm guessing you might be interested in clustering or topic-modelling algorithms and such...Mahout integrates easily with ElasticSearch.

Or Miller group homepage for more details and other projects: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~gpm/index_files/MG_Research_Project...

The downside is that Tumblr does have a greater share of Livejournal/teen angst, but I've carved out my niche of grad students, graphic designers, and classical music aficionados who upload great performances. The fact that TED Chris and John Maeda (President of RISD) use Posterous is tempting, but also makes it more businesslike.

I have yet to understand why I would want to email posts other than videos, as it's not particularly onerous to use bookmarklets. And Posting within Tumblr means my tags autocomplete, whereas Posterous has you write tags in your email subject line. Posting videos to Posterous is easier though, as Tumblr requires videos first to be hosted on Vimeo. Posterous might have another advantage as it is more useful to coordinate updates to a multitude of other sites, including Tumblr. But I screen different content on Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, and Tumblr, so I actually don't want the same things posting on all my sites.

What I wanted to refute was your initial statement that a majority of Supreme Court justice leads to a clear interpretation of the law. What I meant by bringing up judicial activism is to say that one's opinion on judicial activism can influence how one views Supreme Court decisions. Dred Scott v. Sanford is an example of a majority Supreme Court decision, that in my opinion, was undesirable, despite its "fair" albeit narrow reading of the law.

I can't help add, and this will be the last rebuttal I make since we're not going to sway each other's opinion, and I do feel like I messed up by adding something political to HN:

As for foreign corporations, again, I want to emphasize, as I did previously, that free speech is not black/white of merely include them carte blanche or else our rights will be infringed upon. Free speech is not that simplistic although it is sacrosanct.

Why not overturn Morse v. Frederick then, which I believe had such free-speech loving justices as Alito and Scalia from the Citizens United ruling also in the majority of that case. In Morse v. Frederick, free speech could be limited by "important—indeed, perhaps compelling interests" (taken from Justice Roberts writing the decision for the majority). Granted, it limits only illegal drug-promoting student speech, but it is again another example where the justices limited free speech and justified it on grounds of public interest that did not include immediate violence. The kid could still hang his "bong hits 4 Jesus" sign on his private residence or yell it on the streets. Corporations before Citizens United could still runs ads, as could PACs and the corporate executives _individually_ donating them. They just couldn't use corporate treasury funds nor could they run the ads a certain number of days before the date of the election.

Therein, lies the question of what one considers best for public interest. Blue-collar wages of workers have remained stagnant over the last 30 years while white-collar and executive salaries have seen a nice rate of growth. The Chicago School of Economics elegant theories towards markets have not been substantiated by the uglier, noisier empirical evidence. Having studied psychological/behavioral economics and interned for a government official as well as interned with a non-profit lobbying group, I have a more skeptical view of the "well-informed" voter and the "public" servant. So this largely explains why I think differently than you do.

It's simplistic to say that Citizens United ruling is simply a matter of suppression vs. free speech, as Buckley v. Valeo has nuanced to what extent "money" constitutes speech. As Justice Stevens writes in his dissent, "At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

Several people have cited examples of free speech and the press. The Citizens United ruling lifts restrictions of corporate spending in political ads during election campaigns with in-house corporate treasury funds, i.e. unfettered free speech at any time. Rather than looking at NYT Co v. Sullivan, look Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce's interpretation. http://www.moresoftmoneyhardlaw.com/updates/the_supreme_cour...

Excerpted: "Austin’s critics aspire to dissolve all this complexity into a simplistic choice between speech and suppression. In attacking the "political support" language of Austin, they take it to be something strange, an import into the jurisprudence of a notion at odds with core First Amendment values. What they miss is its surprising ordinariness. The Austin case was getting at something important, even—one could say—basic to the mechanisms within the campaign finance laws for isolating the corruptive threat of aggregated group or associational spending."

I'm not arguing that corporations be denied their political speech via spending, which was outside of the case ruling anyway.

Free speech is controlled in very specific cases because of its potential injurious impacts - libel, safety, individuals versus entities, etc. What I take issue with is the extent of power given to special interest groups and lobbyists that override the interests of individual citizens. Is there a difference between groups of people coming together and pooling their money to form a PAC and group of people expressing political views of an entire corporation using corporation treasury funds?

And if you want to go into fringe, extreme positions: what about tax-paying subsidiaries in the US headed by groups of American citizens, but owned by foreign corporations? Should they not then be entitled to equal free speech in our elections?

In any case, it will be interesting to see what comes of the ruling, and thanks for highlighting those two cases.

excerpted from the article: In vivid contrast, the majority overruled a 19-year-old precedent (Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce) that had lambasted the corporation, when it entered the political arena, because of ”the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s suport for the corporation’s political ideas.”

The problem with treating corporations as if they have a "right" to free speech and freedom of association is that they have a disproportionate amount of influence arising from their sheer size and aggregated wealth. We have other mechanisms to ensure that size and wealth do not override the voices of the small and poor in elections (look at how the Senate is constructed versus the House or how we have the electoral college to ensure that wealthier coastal states do not decide presidential elections).

And also, the fact that we grant any rights to corporations at all arises from a court stenographer's foot-note that later opened up loopholes for clever (although might I add shortsighted) lawyers in subsequent cases that eventually snowballed into granting rights to this nebulous entity. As Justice Stevens noted in his dissent to the Citizens United ruling, "A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.” And yet, we worried that limiting the financial power of corporations will potentially infringe upon OUR (human) 1st Amendment rights. That is the problem for me. We created the corporate entity like a machine to serve our purposes; it does not exist with unalienable rights as we human beings do.

Who donates the most to campaigns, 501(3)(c) non-profits and charities or Fortune 1000 corporations whose explicit purpose is to generate profits for stakeholders?

Anyway, what is the usual habit for similar stories? should I delete this link to clean up HN?

for me, it's Bach and Dvorak to get in my creative sphere

I saw the iPhone dieting app, for example, that tries to skip the manual process of entering in caloric data by photo recognition.

Maybe I have a limited view of Twitter, given that I have yet to figure out what it replaces in my life from email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr (microblog), WordPress, mobile, RSS feed manager, SMS, letters, and actually talking to friends in person or via another friend. A Nielsen wire report from April 2009 mentioned that 60% of new Twitter users fail to return each month, which averages out to about a 40% overall retention rate, whereas Myspace and Facebook are reportedly stable at around 70%.

Psychology research on the cognitive limits of stable relationships has generated an arbitrary Dunbar number of about 150 people, so Twitter followers/followees numbering in the 1000s seems suspect in terms of actual social ties. Average Twitter followers for each user has been reported at around 126, and Facebook is slightly higher, (not sure how those figures were calculated). But given that many Twitter users are celebrities, companies, or businesspeople, and Facebook celebrities/products tend to have fan pages rather than friend accounts, I think we need to see more descriptive statistics other than just the mean. Perhaps the problem here is one of defining and then agreeing upon which definition ought to constitute a "social network." Economics, psychology, marketing, and sociology all have contributed their version. But I still think Twitter is lacking in its delivery of service for the average user who isn't embroiled in business, celebrities, or political turmoil but is looking for a social networking space.

But the one-track curriculum is based off the trivium and quadrivium of medieval education, where you don't have electives but regardless, you get a well-rounded education because they're preparing you to think and inquire. So every student studies Greek, Latin, French, Western classical music, mathematics from the source (like Euclid's Elements and Newton's Principia), physics from the source, chemistry, history, etc. No modern textbooks rehashing information, so theoretically, no passive learning. So this curriculum isn't really a straitjacket.

The one downside is that you're not getting a very multicultural or contemporary view, given that you're reading the Western canon largely pre-World War II. But it's not such a big problem if you again realize that the idea with this education is that you're being trained not in subjects but in the ability to go out and find what you don't know in the classroom on your own and to discuss these new ideas with other people.

I think these guys would be better suited to answer your question. Neil Van Dyke runs the listserv. I read that a company, ITA, sponsors the monthly Boston Lisp meet-up, and browsing their website, they have projects for Lisp. ITA does travel applications, such as the algorithm for Orbitz's (or was it Travelocity?) low-fare search. As Lisp was developed at MIT, I bet there are more companies familiar with it.

Some countries have high organ donor participation merely because they structure it as opting out rather than opting in. Instead of signing up as a donor, people have to sign a form to opt out. Is it better than rewarding people who do opt in, as in the incentivized altruistic plan?

At least in terms of a retirement savings plans doing the same thing, I think the automatic opt-in mechanism is better, but organ donations are trickier because they usually involve some emotional or religious conundrum over organ donation.

But if they helped you get the loans in some way that doesn't involve their credit getting damaged should you fall behind on payments, maybe you should talk to a financial counselor about options, like consolidating loans or asking for a forbearance due to unemployment/hardship. That's going to make your loan principal grow very large though.

So I also think that working for a few years to pay off the loans is the best idea because then you can focus on your startup without the stress of looming monthly loan payments on top of earning no salary whilst developing, but perhaps you should ask someone who can give more specific advice. Not to sound harsh, but it seems that by asking internet boards, you're looking for a way to alleviate your conscience, both to yourself (in terms of your life ambitions) and to your family (in expectations and finance). Don't worry too much Good luck with whatever decision you make!

We need not necessarily be suspicious of the Fed, however, in devaluing fiat currency. It might be easier to think this if you think of interest rates and inflation differently. Interest rates set by the Fed, like the federal funds rate or the discount rate, and inflation are actually negatively correlated. That is, the lower the interest rate, the higher the rate of inflation that will ensue as the monetary supply expands and more goods/services are produced. This is the rationale behind our low interest rate during the recent recession. The interest rate is more of a price on the available credit. A low interest rate makes borrowing more attractive, and thus investing into a new project (rather than borrowing on consumer credit for mere consumption like jewelry or a mortgage for a house that you can't afford) will increase. Instead of thinking of interest and inflation solely as finance charges, think of them as prices of credit/investing and controlling supply/demand of goods in the macroeconomy.

So making the comparison between the Fed and JP Morgan or any private bank in terms of interest rate charging and inflation is misleading. Private, publicly traded banks have the sole goal of high returns to their shareholders. It may help to understand the calculation of the inflation rate as an interest charge, but the intention of the inflation target and the federal funds rates is markedly different than that of private banks. The Federal Reserve is trying to balance inflation with national economic growth and security, and it is a fine line to walk.

And in response to Rothschild, while monetary policy is a powerful tool to regulate the economy, we also have the mechanism of fiscal policy, i.e. government spending in infrastructure and national programs. Fiscal policy is more of a clunker in terms of being slower, since it requires political will of a heterogeneous group of thinkers, but it does present an alternative to pure monetary policy. (When I say monetary policy, I mean anything a central bank does to regulate the amount of currency circulating outside the reserves).