Ben Shoemate's Notebook

In an effort to better understand the patterns within the 2008 presidential candidate donations, the authors produced this interesting diagram, mapping all donations made between January 2007 and July 2008, to McCain (left in red) and Obama (right in blue). The two inner circles represent the total amount of donations for both candidates, while the outer segments illustrate variations in the amounts donated. The top-most bracket is any donation between $1 and $100, the second: $101 - $500, the third: $501 - $,1000 and the final: all amounts over $1,000. The size of each bracket represents the percentage amount that bracket constitutes in a candidate's total donations, and the hair-like lines coming out of them are the names of each donor, which produces a useful visual reference to the density of each category.

The distinction between candidates is immediately perceived with this visualization. As the authors explain: "What is most striking to us is how much more of Obama's donations come from the $1 to $100 bracket. We found a high number of students, artists, unemployed and self-employed people who fell in this bracket. One can speculate that these are the younger-generation individuals who will be voting for the first time or they are a struggling class of lower income workers. Probably more significant: this shows how much internet contributions have helped the Obama campaign, assuming the smaller amounts were made online. This data also shows that a majority of McCain's donations come from the $500 to $1000 bracket of donors. The amount is still smaller than Obama's, but this makes up almost two-thirds of his donations".

Since the donation information must be disclosed to the public, the authors turned to the Federal Election Commission to find a data set containing all donors, the amount they donated as well as other information they may explore in the future (e.g. occupation, zip code, employer). The data set time span is currently from January, 2007 through July, 2008, but the authors will be updating this information every month, as new data is released.

My friends at ContentRobot launched a neat site called We Fix WP. Simple, direct, and easy to understand. They fix WordPress. Need your theme tweaked? They can help. Want a few little bits and pieces made pretty? That’s them. Karen and Dana are two really nice, unassuming people who work with the likes of Stephanie Agresta and a whole host of Internet personalities. If Steph likes them, then that’s good enough for me.

But honestly, in my experience, I find that Karen and Dana have been at most of the cool geek events and are always ready to help out.

They’re another resource like Nico Pin that I know I can count on if I’m in a bind. You should count on them, too. Why get too deep into the nitty gritty when you can have your own robots?

Check out We Fix WP for more information.

via http://www.fubiz.net/blog/index.php?2008/07/17/1947-alex-dukal

The Denver police union is selling T-shirts commemorating the good times they had last month. It costs just $10, which is quite a deal!

The back of the shirts reads, "We get up early to beat the crowds" and "2008 DNC," and has a caricature of a police officer holding a baton.

Detective Nick Rogers, a member of the Police Protective Association board, said police often issue T-shirts to commemorate big events.

Rogers said each Denver officer was given one of the shirts free and others are on sale for $10 each at police union offices.

He said the union expects to sell about 2,000 of them.

(Via Reason)

While cell phone camera technology has been getting better and better, who would've thought that they would actually be able to help count infected blood cells without relying on lens optics? That's the discovery boffins from the University of California, Los Angeles managed to do using simple camera phone CCD sensors to distinguish between normal and infected cells in blood samples.

First published in the Royal Society of Chemistry's journal Lab Chip in 2007, the LUCAS technique, developed by UCLA researchers, demonstrated a lens-free method for quickly and accurately counting targeted cell types in a homogenous cell solution. Removing the lens from the imaging process allows LUCAS to be scaled down to the point that it can eventually be integrated into a regular wireless cell phone. Samples could be loaded into a specially equipped phone using a disposable microfluidic chip. The UCLA researchers have now improved the LUCAS technique to the point that it can classify a significantly larger sample volume than previously shown — up to 5 milliliters, from an earlier volume of less than 0.1 ml — representing a major step toward portable medical diagnostic applications.

I'll never look at my cell phone camera in the same way ever again...

Add a comment | From: Camera Phone Counts Infected Blood Cells | Visit Ubergizmo | Good deals

via http://2photo.ru/2008/06/10/3dart_ot_zamak.html

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today. - Laurence J. Peter

Ever wondered why we place so much faith in experts; and I don’t mean those people that we see pimping themselves on newscasts or any other ten second soundbite about how they know all the how’s and why’s of any given situation. Those people are usually no better than vacuous filler between commercials and their opinions change with whoever is signing their consultancy checks.

No, true experts are those people who have a deep passion and and even deeper understanding about a subject that drives them to learn something new each and every day. They are the people who realize that for everything that they think they know there is just as much that they don’t know and are the first to admit it.

These are the real experts and you aren’t going to find them hanging around on some stupid ass social network wanting to be your friend. Their time is too valuable for that useless type of distraction - there are too many things to learn to spend it standing around some virtual water cooler. Unfortunately though we have been lead to believe in this silly idea of the wisdom of the crowd and seem to think that all the answers are going to be found on social networks like Twitter, FriendFeed or some such other water cooler. The reality is that this is the farthest thing from the truth and this is something that people like Robert Scoble are beginning to find out, much to their chagrin:

I find I’m becoming a lot more like Andrew Keen. That scares the shit out of me. Why? I find I’m looking to experts and elites more and more, because the crap I’m seeing out of all of our mouths is just so, um, wrong. As my history teacher back in the 1980s used to say “the masses are asses.” This is shaking my belief system pretty thoroughly, because I actually do believe that a decentralized system is stronger than one with one guy or gal in the middle controlling everything. But for a decentralized system to work we have to 1. be smart and 2. believe in each other. Those two things are proving to me to be pretty trying right now.

Even the idea that a Nobel Laureate of Economics or a discoverer of the Human Genome are going to be found sitting around there computers chumming it up on FriendFeed ot Twitter is ridiculous. Like really, give your head a shake if you believe that. Supposing though that for some incredible reason you did find someone like Stephen Hawking on your friends list do you even thing you would be able to comprehend what the hell they were talking about. Not likely.

So Robert, here’s a suggestion for you. Forget even thinking that places like FriendFeed or Twitter are anything more than really cool places to get together with friends and chew the fat. You know .. just like the old newsgroups or web forums. You want the experts - you’re going to have to go find them where they live because they’re too damn busy to find any value in our silly little corner of the Internet.Similar Posts:

• Don’t Guilt Me Into Being A Friend
• How Not To Be Liked On FriendFeed
• Bozo Bin Time For Social Media
• FriendFeed Is Growing Nicely Regardless Of What Scoble Says
• OMG People Are Using Web 2.0 For Bad Things

Because of current events, Arthur magazine just posted the column I wrote for their upcoming issue, written a month or so ago, about what's happening right now. I figured I'd share it with you here:

I poked my head up from writing my book a couple of months ago to engage with Arthur readers about the subject I was working on: the credit crunch and what to do about it [see “Riding Out the Credit Crisis” in Arthur No. 29/May 2008]. I got more email about that piece than anything I have written since a column threatening to defect from the Mac community back in the Quadra days.

Many readers thought I was hinting at something under the surface—a conspiracy, of sorts, to take money from the poor and give it to the rich. It sounded to many like I was describing an economic system actually designed—planned—to redistribute income in the worst possible ways.

I guess I’d have to agree with that premise. Only it’s not a secret conspiracy. It’s an overt one, and playing out in full view of anyone who has time (time is money, after all) to observe it.

The mortgage and credit crisis wasn’t merely predictable; it was predicted. And not by a market bear or conspiracy theorist, but by the people and institutions responsible. The record number of foreclosures, credit defaults, and, now, institutional collapses is not the result of the churn of random market forces, but rather a series of highly lobbied changes to law, highly promoted ideologies of wealth and home ownership, and monetary policies highly biased toward corporate greed.

It all started to make sense to me when I attended Learning Annex’s Wealth Expo earlier this year—a seminar where teachers of The Secret, the hosts of Flip This House, George Foreman, Tony Robbins and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan [pictured above in banner from Learning Annex website] purportedly taught the thousands in attendance how to take advantage of the current foreclosure boom....

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

via http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-01/found