linkstream2 microblog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

The Astonishing Rise of Angela #Merkel
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/quiet-german from theoretical #chemist, in the GDR, to Machiavellian calculator, post ’89

developer of Spacewar, who also briefly taught Bill Gates to program

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Russell

employee #3 at microsoft, who did floating pt. in MS Basic. Such a different future from #1 & #2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Davidoff

http://www.nature.com/news/nature-makes-all-articles-free-to-view-1.16460

Social media fingerprints of unemployment, from detecting network components in tweet mining arxiv.org/abs/1411.3140 +
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/532746/twitter-exhaust-reveals-patterns-of-unemployment

Lots of press for an arxiv paper, viz:
Twitter “Exhaust” Reveals Patterns of Unemployment | MIT Technology Review

QT:{{”

So the team analysed the rate at which messages were exchanged between regions using a standard community detection algorithm. This revealed 340 independent areas of economic activity, which largely coincide with other measures of geographic and economic distribution. “This result shows that the mobility detected from geolocated tweets and the communities obtained are a good description of economical areas,” they say.

Finally, they looked at the unemployment figures in each of these regions and then mined their database for correlations with twitter activity.

“}}

Programmer’s Price
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/programmers-price@10xmgmt: Talent agency for the developer stack, UI guru to datascientist, even a bioinformatician

American Chronicles NYer NOVEMBER 24, 2014 ISSUE
Want to hire a coding superstar? Call the agent.
BY LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE

QT:{{”
Solomon leaned back in his chair and flipped through a mental Rolodex of his clients. “I definitely have some ideas,” he said, after a minute. “The first person who comes to mind, he’s also a
bioinformatician.” He rattled off a dazzling list of accomplishments: the developer does work for the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, where he is attempting to attack complicated biological problems using crowdsourcing, and had created Twitter tools capable of influencing elections. Solomon thought that he might be interested in AuthorBee’s use of Twitter. “He knows the Twitter A.P.I. in his sleep.”
…
And, like actual rock stars, rock-star developers come in a range of personality types. Guvench had briefed me at the coffee shop: front-end guys—designers and user-interface engineers—make products that interact with what he referred to as “normal” people. As a result, “they’re sort of hip,” he said. “Especially designers—they dress nicely.” The further you get down the “stack,” Guvench explained, “the more . . .” He paused. “ ‘Neckbeard’ is the word that comes to mind.” Back-end engineers, like data scientists and system administrators, “are the most brilliant people,” he said. “They may not be the most fun to talk to at a party, but they’re really fucking good at talking to computers.” Of course, he added, the stereotype doesn’t apply to his clients.
“}}

http://events.nytimes.com/2002/05/15/dining/15NOTE.html?_r=1&

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/print-thyself

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/11/30/tool-easily-edit-dna-transforms-research-holds-potential-for-medicine/X7srGGFardarsWBfCqEL2H/story.html