NYTimes: Disney Tackles Major Theme Park Problem: Lines

Fine-tuning the experience for the "entertain-me-right-this-second generation" takes a lot of technology, manpower, and work.

Disney Tackles Major Theme Park Problem: Lines

An underground high-tech nerve center at Disney World addresses the most low-tech of problems: long waits.

http://nyti.ms/gvNsmz

NYTimes: Scholars Recruit Public for Project

This reminds me of the stardust@home project, recruiting the public to whittle away at a mammoth task. In the stardust project it's to scan massive numbers of photomicrographs of a filter that traveled through space collecting dust for eventual analysis. In this article about the Bentham project, the public is being recruited to painstakingly interpret and copy handwritten manuscripts so they're available digitally. Here is a sample page of the manuscript and it's interpretation by the project. TE
Scholars Recruit Public for Project
A project in London is using crowd-sourcing to transcribe 40,000 unpublished manuscripts of the Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
http://nyti.ms/hymPWG

32 inches of snow in 40 seconds

Watch the tree branches sag as they're laden with snow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy0P5vuCntc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

NYTimes: In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture

At ngrams.googlelabs.com, you can search the history of any word's prevalence if usage over 200 years. Most interesting for words that have changed their meaning ("gay") or come into usage ("evolution") or gained acceptance ("suffrage") or had a transient fad ("flapper"). TE
In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture
A Google-backed project allows the frequency of specific words and phrases to be tracked in centuries of books.
http://nyti.ms/eMacup

Search word frequency over time

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

Marie Laurencin.

This painting, in the Orangerie Museum next to the Louvre in Paris, has a fascinating expression - wistful, languorous, effete. It's by a lesser known impressionist/cubist, Marie Laurencin, a contemporary of Picasso.

NYTimes: Airport Apps Put You First in Line

Apps like gateguru help you find airport amenities, and TSA has an app that predicts security wait times. TE

PRACTICAL TRAVELER: Airport Apps Put You First in Line

From finding parking to giving you early gate information, 10 travel apps that can save your vacation.

http://nyti.ms/hZtXXw

Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://itunes.com/apps/nytimes

Sent from my iPhone

NYTimes: Is Going to an Elite College Worth the Cost? State schools may be best value.

Elite schools cost more, may lead to more prestigious post-secondary offerings, but the connections of a huge state school may be more fertile or employment. It depends. TE
Is Going to an Elite College Worth the Cost?
The sluggish economy and rising costs of college have only intensified questions about whether expensive, prestigious colleges make any difference.
http://nyti.ms/fPFl3k

amazing joke no reflection in the Mirror

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoyAZSlvAQE&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Sent from my iPhone

NYTimes: Deal Reached to Recover $7.2 Billion for Madoff Victims

The Bernie Madoff pay-back: "the settlement constituted the largest single forfeiture in American judicial history"

DEALBOOK: Deal Reached to Recover $7.2 Billion for Madoff Victims

The trustee charged with recovering assets in the Bernie Madoff bankruptcy and federal prosecutors have obtained a civil settlement with the estate of one of Madoff's investors.

http://nyti.ms/g22JPF

Very cool animated graph of demographics

This animated graph is explained so clearly. A tremendous amount of data made simple.

track flight prices automatically

www.yapta.com
Yapta lets you track changes in flight prices and helps you find refunds on airline tickets.
Yapta helps you save money on airline tickets by letting you track the flights you want, notifying you of price drops on those flights, and getting you refunds or travel ...


Also see bing travel, which incorporated farecast.com that predicts which direction flight prices are going and whether it's time to buy or not. 

Time lapse daily photos of people...

A pregnancy:


This guy is really devoted to documenting his aging process - he built a rig and carried it with him when he traveled... He wanted his head to turn at the same rate as the earth rotates around the sun.
You can read about it on his blog post at http://www.danhanna.com/aging_project/p.html


The right hand image here is 'morphed' or smoothed to make the changes smoother and more gradual.

Daredevils - Wow

Incredible seamanship

Look at this seamanship - incredibly intuitive, or just incredibly lucky?

"Without accountability we'd all behave unjustly." - Plato

… anonymity increases unethical behavior. Road rage bubbles up in the relative anonymity of one’s car. And in the online world, which can offer total anonymity, the effect is even more pronounced. People — even ordinary, good people — often change their behavior in radical ways. 

“Trolling, defined as the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory, or provocative messages in public forums” [is a result of] "the online disinhibition effect."

…“Plato touched upon the subject of anonymity and morality in his parable of the ring of Gyges. That mythical ring gave its owner the power of invisibility, and Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would become a thief, knowing that he couldn’t be caught. Morality, Plato argues, comes from full disclosure; without accountability for our actions we would all behave unjustly.”

…“Instead of waiting around for human nature to change, let’s start to rein in bad behavior by promoting accountability…Ask your users to report trolls and call them out for polluting the conversation.” (Julie Zhuo is a product design manager at Facebook.)

The full op-ed piece is from the NYT.

Does it matter where you go to college?

" A long-term study of 6,335 college graduates ...found that graduating from a college where entering students have higher SAT scores -- one marker of elite colleges -- didn't pay off in higher post-graduation income. Researchers found that students who applied to several elite schools but didn't attend them -- either because of rejection or by their own choice -- are more likely to earn high incomes later than students who actually attended elite schools." So...what to look for instead? "...the greater the opportunity for engagement and critical, creative and collaborative learning with faculty, peers and community, the more likely the chance for future success."   What You Do vs. Where You Go By Martha O'Connell The key to success in college and beyond has more to do with what a student does with their time during college than where they choose to attend.