August 2010
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De Inventione Punctus →
Anne Trubek’s “The Very Long His tory of Emoticons”:
“A punctuation purist would claim that emoticons are debased ways to signal tone and voice, some thing a good writer should be able to indicate with words. But the con trary is true: The his tory of punc tu a tion is pre cisely the his tory of using sym bols to denote tone and voice. Seen in this way, emoticons are simply the latest comma...
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Renaissance Technologies LLC →
Holdings Filed on 2010-05-13
July 2010
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Designing better urban noise →
“… Earlier this year, Deborah Hall, a psychology lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, gave a talk about how listeners react to different urban soundscapes when put into a fMRI machine. It turns out that loudness is not the only factor that determines how people react to urban soundscapes. A perception of pleasantness actually changes the way we feel about sounds. Loud bird song is...
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Nussbaum: Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism →
“…My articulation of these issues is motivated, in part, by my experience working on international quality-of-life issues in an institute for development economics connected with the United Nations. It is motivated, as well, by the renewal of appeals to the nation, and national pride, in some recent discussions of American character and American education. In a by now well-known op-ed...
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WatchSuper Mario Bros. (by Surfap)
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“… Women with smaller feet have prettier faces, at least according to the...”
– Why men are attracted to women with small feet
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What you can teach a fetus →
“… He adds that babies probably will remember a CD that the mother plays regularly during the later weeks of pregnancy, and that this could be used to calm them after birth.”
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New Developments in AI →
“… For many years, the conventional wisdom, certainly within the auto industry, was that carmakers would never introduce intelligent safety features so long as there were plaintiff lawyers. Autonomous technology shifted the liability for accidents from the car’s owner to the car’s maker, said industry spokespeople, and was tantamount to corporate suicide. Three developments changed...
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Why Some Countries Drive on the Right and Some... →
“… During the middle ages the roads weren’t always very safe for travelers; meeting people coming the other way on the road was something best done defensively. Historians then believe the keep-left rule was adopted because, on a horse, if you were right handed and you met some unsavory company on the road, you could draw your weapon, typically attached to your left side, with your...
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Six nouns, six verbs, who knows →
“May axes Labour police beat pledge - James notes that every single one of these six words can serve as either a noun (sample possible senses: fifth month; woodcutting implements; opposition party; constabulary; musical timing unit; commitment) or a verb (will possibly; performs chopping; work hard; oversee; physically chastise; give a promise). So we start with 26= 64 different assignments...
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Undersea Cable Set To Boost West Africa Broadband →
“… An expanding network and falling prices are expected to fuel explosive growth in mobile broadband in Africa over the next few years, particularly Nigeria, which has overtaken South Africa to become the continent’s largest mobile telecoms market.”
