I think you missed the key point -- there's no fixed scale for CME, so why would you write an article on the lack of something?
CMEs and flares are *not* the same thing -- the CME is an ejection of plasma from the sun, while a flare is energy only. You also have what are called 'SEP events' (Solar Energetic Particles), where they're measuring highly energetic particles in situ (in place vs. remote sensing like from telesopes)... and I probably shouldn't say that there's no CME classification... there are a few classifications that are based on the shape, which is a factor of the location of the observer. You'll often see CME catalogs list the CPA (central position angle, ie, what direction the CME left the sun) as 'halo', which just means that it came out of all sides from the point of view of that observation.
If you want more info, try asking at The Sun Today, which is run by an actual solar physicist. (disclaimer: it's one of my co-workers)
ps. the maximum flare class mistake has even been made by the people doing EPO (education & public outreach) for SDO... I had to e-mail around after a facebook post said that the scale went up to X9... so even the 'professionals' (in this case, educators, not scientists) don't know the system that well.
'ranking system for CME/EMP effects'... 'all the way up to X5'?
Wow. Well, what you're talking about is the 'Flare Class' which only classifies the amount of x-ray energy given off by a flare. It's a log scale, so M is 10x as large as a C, and X is 10x as large as an M. Of course, there's no cap on it, and there have been X20 flares recorded. Of course, the sensors saturate, and as we're only really dealing with one significant figure and a magnitude, I don't know how much precision they have at those higher values.
To make things even more fun, there's also a flare 'importance' value, which is based on the energy and size of the flaring region in the optical (visible) spectrum.
The closest thing that I can think of to what you describe would be a catalog of ICMEs (Interplanetary CMEs), but even those, if you look at the catalog, are just raw numbers, no sort of ranking to it. (the column with 'A' and 'B' in it are which of the two STEREO spacecraft saw the event, 'Ahead' or 'Behind')
Disclaimer : I'm not a solar physicist, but I work in a solar data archive, and have done work trying to normalize solar event catalogs.
Well, as you're open to suggestions -- have you considered trying to do synonym/equivalence/broader expansion? And the ability to turn off the stemmed search?
I think part of the problem is that what I call something might not what it's called when it's listed in the Federal Register. My work revolves around 'physics data'... but if you search for that term, you get lots of false positives on 'physical data'... but of course, the broader terms 'science data' and 'research data' also apply. It's almost like you need a library cataloger processing them all.
And using 'research data', I then manage to find crap like an announcement posted on Jan 12th that's already closed, so it's almost more obnoxious to actually find the things of interest and see that they've obviously stacked the deck so that only people they've given advance notice to have a chance to actually respond in the time.
It's also looking like there are whole classes of notices that I'd like to avoid... like all of the stuff labeled 'findings-of-research-misconduct', whereas you just have the 4 broad categories Rule / Proposed Rule / Notice / Presidential Document. I see there's a pretty clear 'notice of meetings'... I'm guessing you could spend an hour or two on card sorting and find some worthwhile groupings. (yes, I know, you really need to run card sorting exercises with users of the system, but I still think a quick run through will find something useful)
I guess my issue is that I can't manage to find a useful query that finds stuff I care about, but doesn't return an order of magnitude more of false positives in the process.
ps. and I'm still ticked off about the whole 'social media rules' OMB memo, because my group spent more than a year trying to get a waiver pushed through to use long-lived cookies, and my agency didn't bother mentioning that a blanket exception had come down from on high. (and they still took months after that to approve our usage).
So even if 99.9% of the time, the 'odd, irregular result' is worthless... there's also the chance that it's revolutionary, and we want to make sure that those get preserved. It might be that 5 people have similar 'odd, irregular' results, but they can then compare notes amongst themselves and figure out what might be the significant factor and make it reproducable.
For #1, there was The Journal of Earth Science Phenomena (hasn't had anything new in over a year), where they'd publish what they called 'micro-articles', which was mostly just a picture and a short description. Unlike a tweet, it actually had some peer-review, and enough information to make the item useful in its own regard. In solar physics, it's not a journal, but there's the Heliophysics Event Registry, where scientists can submit events/features/phenomena, but it's not peer reviewed. (and some are submitted via pipeline processing, so there might not've been any human involved in the detection other than writing the software)
For the negative results, there are plenty of dedicated journals in various fields, and if there isn't, there's always PLoS ONE. It's possible that they might take the irreproducable stuff, too. In their description, they say they'll take anything that's 'technically sound'. They do use a model that's different from other peer-reviewed journals, and go with the author-pays approach, which many of the other journals claim makes them invalid (yet, those same journals charge even more to make your article 'open access' if it gets accepted)
It's also my photo studio, but the criteria doesn't say you can't do more than just computing in the room
Yes it does. It must be 'devoted to data processing'. Of course, they never define 'data processing', so maybe it it were a digital camera, they'd still consider it.
The 2011 update to data.gov actually allows whoever is submitting the data to describe it such that people can make use of it, including via visualization (maps, graphs, etc.) or via API to make custom applications.
So my question for Carl would be : What can we do to get more government agencies to actually put their data in there? And if they won't do it, should resource.org or similar groups work to put up something similar, so that people who have gotten information through FOIA can share it back out to wider audiences?
I didn't hear about these until ~4 weeks after the original announcement, and with the holidays, it was too late to try to get the societies I'm involved with to prepare and vote on official statements. Are there any places where people can get/post notices of these sorts of things so that we can stay informed and try to help influence policies?
You bring up an interesting point... but he did die, and was resurrected, so there *was* a time of death to begin the timer ticking for the fixed term.*
But if someone's brought back to life after a long period (eg, cryogenically frozen and we find a way to restore it), does the 'fixed term' reset, or did their time frozen get subtracted from when they die the second time? (eg, you get frozen, then thawed 40 years later... then die 20 years later, do you get 70 years from then, or 30 (remaining of the 70), or 10 (the counter never stopped)?
And what does this mean for zombies, vampires and the other undead? I mean, the current wording is:
endures for a term consisting of the life of the author and 70 years after the authorâ(TM)s death.
So, as there's a gap between their life and their death, what does this mean for holders of copyright who become vampires? (zombies might not be an issue, as they died and were re-animated)
* Unless you go with the theory that bungled the crucifixtion and took him down when he was simply conconcious, so he never died, and the shroud of turin was evidence of a warm body.
You know, there are handbooks where you can just look up the bolt pattern, and it'll give you multipliers to use based on the strength of the individual bolts. So, you just need a couple of hours of lab work testing to make sure the bolts are within spec, a few minutes to look up the right table to use, and you're done. Or you can just use STAAD.
Of course, you also need to know what the required live loads are for that bridge, but you can get that from the building codes. And if you doesn't design to the required loads, you can lose your license. (yes, unlike software development, engineers are licensed)
(disclaimer : I have an ABET-accredited bachelor's in civil engineering, but I went into software development, and never got my license)
Do you really mean to tell me that you only use words as they're defined in the dictionary? And if so, which dictionary? Because as we all know, there's lots of different standards out there. And then there's versioning of the standards, and those implementations that aren't quite complient (in language, those would be regional dialets). Language is not as cut and dried as you think it might be.
But your suggestion is actually done in other countries -- the French have a government group that officially approves new words to be added to their language, with the result that they have much fewer words than we do.
And I admit, there are problems with allowing anyone to change the language -- we have judges who are willing to use modern definitions of terms to decide what 200+ year old legal documents mean... because after all, they should've planned for language to change when they write the contitution and the bill of rights.
These sources differ from both conventional dictionary publishers and crowd-sourced efforts like the excellent Wiktionary for their emphasis on avoiding human intervention rather than fostering it.
You make it sound like they're completely removing the human elements. And just, a corpus by nature does that, as they're only really involved in setting the bounds of the collection and letting the authors speak for themselves. Wordnik, on the other hand, allows *anyone* to contribute, but they're not allowed to give definitions. (definitions are only gathered from official dictionaries and the like). What you do with Wordnik is give examples of the word in context -- because it's actually really hard to define some words.
The thing is -- there's no editors trying to come up with 'is this a word or not'... if you put it in, it's a word. It doesn't matter that only you and your 4 friends use it, or that it's important enough -- if you want to add it, you can. Yes, they also automate adding stuff from other sources, and so did wikipedia early on (CIA factbook for countries, US census for places in the US, etc.)
Yes, you can use wordnik as a sort of meta-dictionary, but you can also add words to it, look to see the values in scrabble, tag words (words you hate, jargon in your field, etc.). It *is* fostering human intervention -- how many of you out there can add a word to a print dictionary? And unlike those print dictionaries, we don't have to wait 3-4 years before someone decides that something is 'officially' a word.
C'mon... at least cite the original material. From BOFH #6:
It's friday, so I get into work early, before lunch even. The phone rings. Shit!
I turn the page on the excuse sheet. "SOLAR FLARES" stares out at me. I'd better read up on that. Two minutes later I'm ready to answer the phone.
"Hello?" I say.
"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, I'VE BEEN TRYING TO GET YOU ALL MORNING?!"
I hate it when they shout at me early in the morning. It always puts me in a bad mood. You know what I mean.
"Ah, yes. Well, there's been some solar activity this morning, it always disrupts electronics..." I say, sweet as a sugar pie.
"Huh? But I could get through to my friends?!"
"Yes, that's entirely possible, solar activity is very unpredictable in it's effects. Why last week, we had some files just dissappear from a guys account while he was working on it!"
"Really?"
"Straight Up! Hey, do you want me to check your account?"
"Yes please, I've got some important stuff in there!"
"Ok, what's your username..."
He tells me. Honestly, it's like shooting a fish in a barrel. Twice. With an Elephant Gun. At point blank range. In the head.
(Do I really need to tell you the clicky clicky bit?.. I think not)
"How many files are in your account?" I ask
"Um, well there should be about 20 in my thesis writeup, 10 or so with the data for it, and another 20 or so in a book that I'm writing"
"Hmmm. Well, I think we caught it just in time. You've still got 2 files left....cshrc and.login"
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaggggggggghhhh!"
He sobs into the receiver a bit - it really turns my stomach.
Now, in my case, as I work at the Solar Data Analysis Center, and most of the folks I work with have phds in solar physics, astronomy or similar, the excuse just doesn't work. (and my boss reads BOFH)
Maybe not all, but they do inform pilots who are flying across the poles -- the Earth's magnetic field deflects some space weather, but ends up concentrating the stuff at the poles (which is why the Northern/Southern Lights are strongest near the poles)
The result is that many pilots won't fly those routes, instead taking other routes which often require an extra stop for refueling, or reducing the amount of luggage (to be brought later).
So if you're planning on a trip that's to the other hemisphere, odds are, you're looking at delays and/or lost baggage.
It depends on the format (hardback or paperback), and how well the patrons take care of the books.
*You* might be able to loan out a book 26 times, and get it back in good condition, but unfortunately for libraries, there's a decent chance of books being lost, damaged, etc, and that number doesn't seem that far out of line.
(disclaimer -- I volunteer at the local Friends of the Library, managing the book sale, so I see a lot of weeded & damaged books... and moldy donations... please don't give them to us when they're already moldy; even musty means it's likely to fall apart after a couple more readings (but we can still sell those)).
I've heard good things about the Venezuelean security screeners (I think it was Venezualean, I heard about it second-hand)... maybe it was just a single case, and not the way it's all done, but rather than the 'standard 3' we used to get asked (did you pack your own bag, etc.), they'd ask questions like 'What's the color of the inside of your suitcase?'
They were presenting at a conference, and the screener (coming in at customs), asked them to give the presentation to them. If it's someone claiming to be visiting as a tourist, you ask them what hotel they're staying at (and you can check the reservation), and what sites they plan on seeing.
I admit, it's possible to be prepared for all of these questions... but when they're less predictable (giving the screener the ability to improvise), and it's not just yes/no questions, it's harder to plan for.
This only matters if people go to the first page, and never go to any additional ones.
For most websites these days, you'll take the initial hit from javascript and the 'branding' images when you first get to the site... but the changing content per page is much lower.
If websites are using standard javascript libraries being served by Google's CDN, then it's possible that someone visiting your page already has jquery, mootools or similar cached and doesn't need to load yet another copy.
I also didn't see if they had any comparison between transferred size vs. used size. (eg, javascript that's sent compressed)... and as this is from an new archive... does anyone know if Archive.org could analyze their holdings to see what the longer term trends are?
At the closing plenary for the 2011 IA Summit, Cennydd Bowles called out the whole 'UX' (User Experience) community as a whole, in that the role that most of them play is in trying to get people to spend more time on websites and buy more stuff, rather than doing stuff that really improves the world. You've taken a similar stance on 'gamification', but there's at least two groups (Zooniverse and FoldIt) using it for good as they're helping to advance science. Can you think of any other situations where we could use video games to improve the world at a grand scale, and not just simple 'edutainment'?
A method, comprising: at a portable electronic device with a touch screen display: displaying on the touch screen display a first user interface for a phone application during a phone call; detecting activation of a menu icon or menu button during the phone call, in response to detecting activation of the menu icon or menu button, replacing the first user interface for the phone application with a menu of application icons including an icon for the phone application and an icon for a non-telephone application; maintaining the phone call while displaying the menu of application icons on the touch screen display; detecting a finger gesture on an application icon in the menu of application icons other than the phone application icon; in response to detecting the finger gesture on the application icon other than the phone application icon, displaying a corresponding application user interface on the touch screen display while continuing to maintain the phone call and modifying the corresponding application user interface to include a switch application icon that is not displayed in the corresponding application user interface when there is no ongoing phone call; detecting a finger gesture on the touch screen display on the switch application icon; and in response to detecting the finger gesture on the switch application icon, replacing display of the corresponding application user interface with the first user interface for the phone application while continuing to maintain the phone call.
You know the button in the center bottom of the Palm Pre? Well, it drops the phone call to 'card' mode, so that you can select other apps. Of course, it's not the main 'show all of the apps' button, but it will show the apps in your launch bar (typically phone, addressbook, email, calendar, and the button to bring up the full list) So there you have it... a "menu of application icons including an icon for the phone application and an icon for a non-telephone application" while "maintaining the phone call while displaying the menu of application icons on the touchscreen display".
Now, the thing is, it doesn't fully 'replace' the phone UI... it shrinks the phone to a card so you can switch between apps. And I don't know that it "modif[ies] the corresponding application user interface to include a switch application icon that is not displayed in the corresponding application user interface when there is no ongoing phone call"... I guess it depends on what you consider to be "modify".
(and I wondered why it was that Sprint ran those stupid commercials with the strange looking girl when the Palm Pre came out... all they had to show was multitasking during a phone call, as the iPhone didn't even support multitasking for almost a year after the Pre came out)
It probably has nothing to do with the cost of travel increasing while people have less disposable income available. It must be Facebook's fault.
(disclaimer: I've never gone to a high school reunion, but I thought about going to the 15th, mostly for networking as I had been fired a few months earlier... but they canceled that one)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you missed the key point -- there's no fixed scale for CME, so why would you write an article on the lack of something?
CMEs and flares are *not* the same thing -- the CME is an ejection of plasma from the sun, while a flare is energy only. You also have what are called 'SEP events' (Solar Energetic Particles), where they're measuring highly energetic particles in situ (in place vs. remote sensing like from telesopes) ... and I probably shouldn't say that there's no CME classification ... there are a few classifications that are based on the shape, which is a factor of the location of the observer. You'll often see CME catalogs list the CPA (central position angle, ie, what direction the CME left the sun) as 'halo', which just means that it came out of all sides from the point of view of that observation.
If you want more info, try asking at The Sun Today, which is run by an actual solar physicist. (disclaimer: it's one of my co-workers)
ps. the maximum flare class mistake has even been made by the people doing EPO (education & public outreach) for SDO ... I had to e-mail around after a facebook post said that the scale went up to X9 ... so even the 'professionals' (in this case, educators, not scientists) don't know the system that well.
Wow. Well, what you're talking about is the 'Flare Class' which only classifies the amount of x-ray energy given off by a flare. It's a log scale, so M is 10x as large as a C, and X is 10x as large as an M. Of course, there's no cap on it, and there have been X20 flares recorded. Of course, the sensors saturate, and as we're only really dealing with one significant figure and a magnitude, I don't know how much precision they have at those higher values.
To make things even more fun, there's also a flare 'importance' value, which is based on the energy and size of the flaring region in the optical (visible) spectrum.
But neither of these classifications have to do with CMEs, and particularly not their affects at earth. For that, you'd need to look at the solar wind folks, who are obsessed with things like 'Bz' (z-component of the magnetic field', ie, how is it oriented relative to the earth's magnetic field?) and radio bursts.
The closest thing that I can think of to what you describe would be a catalog of ICMEs (Interplanetary CMEs), but even those, if you look at the catalog, are just raw numbers, no sort of ranking to it. (the column with 'A' and 'B' in it are which of the two STEREO spacecraft saw the event, 'Ahead' or 'Behind')
Disclaimer : I'm not a solar physicist, but I work in a solar data archive, and have done work trying to normalize solar event catalogs.
I'm not sure which I'm more impressed by:
Well, as you're open to suggestions -- have you considered trying to do synonym/equivalence/broader expansion? And the ability to turn off the stemmed search?
I think part of the problem is that what I call something might not what it's called when it's listed in the Federal Register. My work revolves around 'physics data' ... but if you search for that term, you get lots of false positives on 'physical data'... but of course, the broader terms 'science data' and 'research data' also apply. It's almost like you need a library cataloger processing them all.
And using 'research data', I then manage to find crap like an announcement posted on Jan 12th that's already closed, so it's almost more obnoxious to actually find the things of interest and see that they've obviously stacked the deck so that only people they've given advance notice to have a chance to actually respond in the time.
It's also looking like there are whole classes of notices that I'd like to avoid ... like all of the stuff labeled 'findings-of-research-misconduct', whereas you just have the 4 broad categories Rule / Proposed Rule / Notice / Presidential Document. I see there's a pretty clear 'notice of meetings' ... I'm guessing you could spend an hour or two on card sorting and find some worthwhile groupings. (yes, I know, you really need to run card sorting exercises with users of the system, but I still think a quick run through will find something useful)
I guess my issue is that I can't manage to find a useful query that finds stuff I care about, but doesn't return an order of magnitude more of false positives in the process.
ps. and I'm still ticked off about the whole 'social media rules' OMB memo, because my group spent more than a year trying to get a waiver pushed through to use long-lived cookies, and my agency didn't bother mentioning that a blanket exception had come down from on high. (and they still took months after that to approve our usage).
Anyone who thinks WYSIWYG means anything when dealing with HTML is sadly misinformed.
CSS support has gotten better, but I'd still think this classic sums it up pretty well:
http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/archive/2006/06/24/time_breakdown_of_modern_web_d/
I'd link to the original source (http://poisonedminds.com), but the URL no longer works.
Of course, it was ~30 years later after Shechtman had been ridiculed for his 'quasicrystal' discovery.
So even if 99.9% of the time, the 'odd, irregular result' is worthless ... there's also the chance that it's revolutionary, and we want to make sure that those get preserved. It might be that 5 people have similar 'odd, irregular' results, but they can then compare notes amongst themselves and figure out what might be the significant factor and make it reproducable.
For #1, there was The Journal of Earth Science Phenomena (hasn't had anything new in over a year), where they'd publish what they called 'micro-articles', which was mostly just a picture and a short description. Unlike a tweet, it actually had some peer-review, and enough information to make the item useful in its own regard. In solar physics, it's not a journal, but there's the Heliophysics Event Registry, where scientists can submit events/features/phenomena, but it's not peer reviewed. (and some are submitted via pipeline processing, so there might not've been any human involved in the detection other than writing the software)
For the negative results, there are plenty of dedicated journals in various fields, and if there isn't, there's always PLoS ONE. It's possible that they might take the irreproducable stuff, too. In their description, they say they'll take anything that's 'technically sound'. They do use a model that's different from other peer-reviewed journals, and go with the author-pays approach, which many of the other journals claim makes them invalid (yet, those same journals charge even more to make your article 'open access' if it gets accepted)
Yes it does. It must be 'devoted to data processing'. Of course, they never define 'data processing', so maybe it it were a digital camera, they'd still consider it.
The 2011 update to data.gov actually allows whoever is submitting the data to describe it such that people can make use of it, including via visualization (maps, graphs, etc.) or via API to make custom applications.
So my question for Carl would be : What can we do to get more government agencies to actually put their data in there? And if they won't do it, should resource.org or similar groups work to put up something similar, so that people who have gotten information through FOIA can share it back out to wider audiences?
Recently in the federal register, there were two calls for comments about access to data and research from federally funded research:
http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28623
http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28621
I didn't hear about these until ~4 weeks after the original announcement, and with the holidays, it was too late to try to get the societies I'm involved with to prepare and vote on official statements. Are there any places where people can get/post notices of these sorts of things so that we can stay informed and try to help influence policies?
(note -- the second one on data access doesn't close 'til Jan 12th; NSF also has a similar RFC that closes Jan 18th)
You bring up an interesting point ... but he did die, and was resurrected, so there *was* a time of death to begin the timer ticking for the fixed term.*
But if someone's brought back to life after a long period (eg, cryogenically frozen and we find a way to restore it), does the 'fixed term' reset, or did their time frozen get subtracted from when they die the second time? (eg, you get frozen, then thawed 40 years later ... then die 20 years later, do you get 70 years from then, or 30 (remaining of the 70), or 10 (the counter never stopped)?
And what does this mean for zombies, vampires and the other undead? I mean, the current wording is:
So, as there's a gap between their life and their death, what does this mean for holders of copyright who become vampires? (zombies might not be an issue, as they died and were re-animated)
* Unless you go with the theory that bungled the crucifixtion and took him down when he was simply conconcious, so he never died, and the shroud of turin was evidence of a warm body.
850 hours of simulation?
You know, there are handbooks where you can just look up the bolt pattern, and it'll give you multipliers to use based on the strength of the individual bolts. So, you just need a couple of hours of lab work testing to make sure the bolts are within spec, a few minutes to look up the right table to use, and you're done. Or you can just use STAAD.
Of course, you also need to know what the required live loads are for that bridge, but you can get that from the building codes. And if you doesn't design to the required loads, you can lose your license. (yes, unlike software development, engineers are licensed)
(disclaimer : I have an ABET-accredited bachelor's in civil engineering, but I went into software development, and never got my license)
Do you really mean to tell me that you only use words as they're defined in the dictionary? And if so, which dictionary? Because as we all know, there's lots of different standards out there. And then there's versioning of the standards, and those implementations that aren't quite complient (in language, those would be regional dialets). Language is not as cut and dried as you think it might be.
But your suggestion is actually done in other countries -- the French have a government group that officially approves new words to be added to their language, with the result that they have much fewer words than we do.
And I admit, there are problems with allowing anyone to change the language -- we have judges who are willing to use modern definitions of terms to decide what 200+ year old legal documents mean ... because after all, they should've planned for language to change when they write the contitution and the bill of rights.
You make it sound like they're completely removing the human elements. And just, a corpus by nature does that, as they're only really involved in setting the bounds of the collection and letting the authors speak for themselves. Wordnik, on the other hand, allows *anyone* to contribute, but they're not allowed to give definitions. (definitions are only gathered from official dictionaries and the like). What you do with Wordnik is give examples of the word in context -- because it's actually really hard to define some words.
The thing is -- there's no editors trying to come up with 'is this a word or not' ... if you put it in, it's a word. It doesn't matter that only you and your 4 friends use it, or that it's important enough -- if you want to add it, you can. Yes, they also automate adding stuff from other sources, and so did wikipedia early on (CIA factbook for countries, US census for places in the US, etc.)
Yes, you can use wordnik as a sort of meta-dictionary, but you can also add words to it, look to see the values in scrabble, tag words (words you hate, jargon in your field, etc.). It *is* fostering human intervention -- how many of you out there can add a word to a print dictionary? And unlike those print dictionaries, we don't have to wait 3-4 years before someone decides that something is 'officially' a word.
C'mon ... at least cite the original material. From BOFH #6:
Now, in my case, as I work at the Solar Data Analysis Center, and most of the folks I work with have phds in solar physics, astronomy or similar, the excuse just doesn't work. (and my boss reads BOFH)
Maybe not all, but they do inform pilots who are flying across the poles -- the Earth's magnetic field deflects some space weather, but ends up concentrating the stuff at the poles (which is why the Northern/Southern Lights are strongest near the poles)
The result is that many pilots won't fly those routes, instead taking other routes which often require an extra stop for refueling, or reducing the amount of luggage (to be brought later).
So if you're planning on a trip that's to the other hemisphere, odds are, you're looking at delays and/or lost baggage.
My first thought when I saw this was the Adventure Construction Set.
And wasn't Myst originally written in HyperCard?
If you're looking at writing text-based games, there's MudOS and other MUD/MOO/MUSH engines out there, most of which are free.
It depends on the format (hardback or paperback), and how well the patrons take care of the books.
*You* might be able to loan out a book 26 times, and get it back in good condition, but unfortunately for libraries, there's a decent chance of books being lost, damaged, etc, and that number doesn't seem that far out of line.
(disclaimer -- I volunteer at the local Friends of the Library, managing the book sale, so I see a lot of weeded & damaged books ... and moldy donations ... please don't give them to us when they're already moldy; even musty means it's likely to fall apart after a couple more readings (but we can still sell those)).
I've heard good things about the Venezuelean security screeners (I think it was Venezualean, I heard about it second-hand) ... maybe it was just a single case, and not the way it's all done, but rather than the 'standard 3' we used to get asked (did you pack your own bag, etc.), they'd ask questions like 'What's the color of the inside of your suitcase?'
They were presenting at a conference, and the screener (coming in at customs), asked them to give the presentation to them. If it's someone claiming to be visiting as a tourist, you ask them what hotel they're staying at (and you can check the reservation), and what sites they plan on seeing.
I admit, it's possible to be prepared for all of these questions ... but when they're less predictable (giving the screener the ability to improvise), and it's not just yes/no questions, it's harder to plan for.
This only matters if people go to the first page, and never go to any additional ones.
For most websites these days, you'll take the initial hit from javascript and the 'branding' images when you first get to the site ... but the changing content per page is much lower.
If websites are using standard javascript libraries being served by Google's CDN, then it's possible that someone visiting your page already has jquery, mootools or similar cached and doesn't need to load yet another copy.
I also didn't see if they had any comparison between transferred size vs. used size. (eg, javascript that's sent compressed) ... and as this is from an new archive ... does anyone know if Archive.org could analyze their holdings to see what the longer term trends are?
At the closing plenary for the 2011 IA Summit, Cennydd Bowles called out the whole 'UX' (User Experience) community as a whole, in that the role that most of them play is in trying to get people to spend more time on websites and buy more stuff, rather than doing stuff that really improves the world. You've taken a similar stance on 'gamification', but there's at least two groups (Zooniverse and FoldIt) using it for good as they're helping to advance science. Can you think of any other situations where we could use video games to improve the world at a grand scale, and not just simple 'edutainment'?
It used to be that if my Mac crashed, I was in an MS program (word, powerpoint, IE back in the day) ... and now the roles have reversed.
You know the button in the center bottom of the Palm Pre? Well, it drops the phone call to 'card' mode, so that you can select other apps. Of course, it's not the main 'show all of the apps' button, but it will show the apps in your launch bar (typically phone, addressbook, email, calendar, and the button to bring up the full list) So there you have it ... a "menu of application icons including an icon for the phone application and an icon for a non-telephone application" while "maintaining the phone call while displaying the menu of application icons on the touchscreen display".
Now, the thing is, it doesn't fully 'replace' the phone UI ... it shrinks the phone to a card so you can switch between apps. And I don't know that it "modif[ies] the corresponding application user interface to include a switch application icon that is not displayed in the corresponding application user interface when there is no ongoing phone call" ... I guess it depends on what you consider to be "modify".
(and I wondered why it was that Sprint ran those stupid commercials with the strange looking girl when the Palm Pre came out ... all they had to show was multitasking during a phone call, as the iPhone didn't even support multitasking for almost a year after the Pre came out)
It probably has nothing to do with the cost of travel increasing while people have less disposable income available. It must be Facebook's fault.
(disclaimer: I've never gone to a high school reunion, but I thought about going to the 15th, mostly for networking as I had been fired a few months earlier ... but they canceled that one)
Which would be about the time that magnets were no longer allowed in toys for small children, and Magnetix (toys for children that included magnets) were recalled and relabeled for age 6+. (This was an extension of the recall from 2006) Mattel then recalled their toys with magnets in the fall of 2007. ... etc.
Are we still having problems with this 5 years later?
Are we going to need to havea story on here next week that small items are a choking hazard and shouldn't be given to children under 3?