http://www.technotaste.com/blog Social Psychology, Anthropology, Technology, Gluttony - by Judd Antin Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:55:07 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en What do you think about ballot propositions? In California, every election cycle we're asked to vote on somewhere between 4 and 13,000,000 individual propositions. This year, all but one were put on the ballot by petition rather than by the legislature. I'm conflicted. On the one hand, ballot propositions are a ... http://www.technotaste.com/blog/ballot-propositions/ This year's annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) is in San Francisco from Nov. 19th to Nov. 23rd. Looking through the preliminary program (PDF), there are a ton of interesting sessions. As usual, it's bound to be an absolute clusterf*ck, and each time slot has about 30 sessions ... http://www.technotaste.com/blog/aaa-08-in-san-francisco/ Here's another issue I couldn't find a simple answer to. I'm building a website in PHP, and I want a simple front controller. In other words, I want every bit of traffic to run through a central script that farms out the traffic by parsing the URL. And I want ... http://www.technotaste.com/blog/simple-php-front-controller/ Recently I was trying to get .htaccess control working under Windows and XAMPP. I found it surprisingly hard to find the answer, even though it's a simple one. You've got to make two changes to the httpd.conf file, which for me was found in C:/xampp/apache/conf. Search the httpd.conf file for 'mod_rewrite'. ... http://www.technotaste.com/blog/htaccess-xampp-and-windows/ I was reading through the guidelines for the NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants, and came upon the funniest thing: Proposals that violate these regulations in an attempt to squeeze in more information antagonize reviewers and may be returned without consideration. Hah! It's like Messin' with Sasquatch. Just don't do it! http://www.technotaste.com/blog/playing-nice-with-nsf/ The Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) maintains a really useful set of links to topical bibliographies on their wiki. Topics include blogging research, SNS research, and HCI more generally. Great stuff. http://www.technotaste.com/blog/aoir-bibliographies/ Stallman, in typical outspoken fashion, rails against cloud computing in a recent Guardian interview: "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign." Interesting. Well, no one ever said the Stallman wasn't single-minded. His priorities are built so that the privacy concerns are the only thing that matters, so that ... http://www.technotaste.com/blog/stallman-hates-the-cloud/ A few weeks back I was really starting to tire of the constant political punditry. Around the same time someone introduced me to two sites that have now become my first stop for political updates. They're both sites that use a variety of sophisticated statistics to aggregate the avalanche of ... http://www.technotaste.com/blog/election-tracking/ In college I was the musical director of an a cappella group. There, I admit it. Actually, I loved it. We were an all-guys group at Johns Hopkins called The AllNighters, and we were like a fraternity with a purpose other than drinking. I got to sing, to write music, ... http://www.technotaste.com/blog/nostalgia-for-a-cappella/ In an easily recognizable, but nonetheless idiotic, ploy to sell magazines, Wired's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has published a short article called The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. In it he claims that the mere availability of data on a huge scale means that theories ... http://www.technotaste.com/blog/the-end-of-theory-nah/