The company that bought Norms restaurants six years ago is expanding the brand. How the 70-year-old chain plans to stay the same to get ahead.
Tracking the last moments of Kobe Bryant's helicopter
Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)In August 2012, I wrote a quick script to stream front-page Hackernews stories to an IRC channel on Freenode (##hackernews in case you're interested) so that I could quickly glance at popular stories there instead of needing to load Hackernews. Since IRC is my feed reader, I've always tried to pipe as much there as possible.
My favorite part here:
So in 2.5 years of parsing the HTML, I never had any problems. In 2 days of parsing the JSON API, I hit a glitch where all the stories were empty.
Since more people and programs see the HTML than use the API, the HTML ends up being more reliable.
I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. There are some things about working with OER that are just harder or more painful than they need to be, and getting more people actively involved in using OER will require us to reduce or eliminate those po...
Don't quit your day job
Most of the others I’ve heard as well, though many are rarer. Throttlebottom is a solid one that I wasn’t aware of before, but seems very fitting. I’m half-tempted to change the tagline of my website to Philologaster now.
Funding works.
I’ve been teaching for more than 27 years, but it is just in the last five that I stopped grading traditionally, and so I am what some may call an “un-grader”. But the thing is, if you work in an institution where your job is to assign final grades at the end of the semester like I do, then you are still a grader.
Purchasing power parity is a theory that says prices of goods between countries should equalize over time. Formula, how to use, and examples.
After the war, the Swedish economist Gustav Cassel suggested multiplying each currency’s pre-war value by its inflation rate to get the new parity. That formed the basis for today’s PPP. ❧
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:29PM
Why We Don’t Live in a PPP World
PPP depends on the law of one price. That states that once the difference in exchange rates is accounted for, then everything would cost the same.
That’s not true in the real world for four reasons. First, there are differences in transportation costs, taxes, and tariffs. These costs will raise prices in a country. Countries with many trade agreements will have lower prices because they have fewer tariffs. Socialist countries will have higher costs because they have more taxes.
A second reason is that some things, like real estate and haircuts, can’t be shipped. Only ultra-wealthy global travelers can compare the prices of homes in New York to those in London.
A third reason is that not everyone has the same access to international trade. For example, someone in rural China can’t compare the prices of oxen sold throughout the world. But Amazon and other online retailers are providing more real purchasing power parity to even rural dwellers.
A fourth reason is that import costs are subject to exchange rate fluctuations. For example, when the U.S. dollar weakens, then Americans pay more for imports. ❧
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:31PM
Here we use PPP-adjusted data on real incomes from the Global Consumption and Income Project to build an interactive visualisation demonstrating the changing shape of global income since 1980.
Dr Laurie Santos from The Happiness LabThe world's greatest expert on canned TV laugh tracks helps Dr Laurie Santos demonstrate how the emotions of those around us can make us feel happier or more sad. If happiness is so contagious... can we use them to bring joy to ourselves and our loved ones?
Jeff’s research showed that participants pick up other people’s emotions through text— in say, a quick email note or an online comment— just as easily as they do in face-to-face real world interaction.”
The social media giant allowed Jeff to run an experiment to figure out the emotional impact of Facebook posts.
The original link has some additional references and research, but I’ve excerpted some small portions of the ethically questionable research Facebook allowed on emotional contagion several years back.
This research reminds me of things like Tantek Çelik‘s 100 Days of Positive Posts.
At a Lambs Club lunch, with BuzzFeed’s rapid rise arrested, the Times’s Dean Baquet made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Impeachment ennui, Virginia's Lobby Day, and accountability in Puerto Rico.
A gathering of thousands of armed protesters in Virginia last weekend prompted fears of mass violence. On this episode of On the Media, how some militia groups are spinning the lack of bloodshed as victory. Plus, fresh demands for accountability in Puerto Rico, and why the senate impeachment trial feels so predictable.
1. Bob Garfield [@Bobosphere] on the present moment in the impeachment trial. Listen.
2. Lois Beckett [@loisbeckett], reporter at the Guardian, and OTM producer Micah Loewinger [@MicahLoewinger] on the efforts to shape the media narrative among gun rights activists at Virginia's Lobby Day. Listen.
3. OTM producer Alana Casanova-Burgess [@AlanaLlama] on the "double-bind" Puerto Rico faces as earthquakes shake the state. Listen here.
The charges against Greenwald are only the latest result of the unholy, incidental alliance of out-of-date computer laws and political leaders with a grudge.
The Brazilian federal government on Tuesday revealed charges of cybercrimes against Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, for his alleged role in the leaking of explosive messages written by high-ranking law enforcement officials. Press freedom advocates immediately decried the charges as a dangerous blow to basic press freedoms; Greenwald himself told Washington Post cybersecurity reporter Joseph Marks, "Governments [are] figuring out how they can criminalize journalism based on large-scale leaks." In this podcast extra, Marks breaks down the charges and draws comparisons (and contrasts) with the American government's prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
Dr Laurie Santos from The Happiness LabWe all make thousands of choices each day. But making even trivial decisions can sap our energy and cause anxiety. Dr Laurie Santos examines why our society wrongly prioritises choice over happiness, and meets a woman who junked her wardrobe in a bid to improve her life.
There’s some discussion of limiting one’s wardrobe choices as a way of freeing one’s life up a bit. They didn’t mention the oft-heard example of Einstein wearing the same thing every day, but did catch the possibly better example of Obama cycling through the small handful of choices in his wardrobe to limit the yet another decision of many he had to make each day.
