Nobody Seems to Understand What Jeff Bezos is Doing. Does He? →

Amazon is the one major tech firm whose operations, investments, and short- and long-term goals are completely hidden from the reporters and analysts who try to watch its every move.

"Crazy like a fox or just plain crazy?"

Front End Performance Case Study: GitHub →

Nice look at some web front-end optimizations that GitHub seems to be lacking. The principles can be applied to all websites wonderfully.

Is Obama More Popular Than He Should Be? →

Based on the historical relationship between presidential approval and the economy as well as these other factors, is Mr. Obama more or less popular than the model would predict, given the economy and other circumstances during his first three years in office?

Quite an interesting analysis, using 60 years of quarterly data dating all the way back to Eisenhower.

The Invisible Borders That Define American Culture →

Cellphone, moving, linguistic, sports, and political data all combine to show American cultural areas, or how the nation divides itself in different ways through culture. Except Texas, which is just one giant cultural region.

P.S. The map above is the distribution of the use of "pop", "soda", and "coke".

Algorithmic Incentives →

Combining algorithmic complexity, cryptography, and game theory together? Awesome.

Sherry Turkle: Connected, But Alone? →

Great topic and a great speech. So many great quotes:

Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body.

Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.

See also The New York Times's featured Sunday op-ed, which is essentially a transcription of this talk.

Opera Confirms WebKit Prefix Usage →

Opera's precedent is opening the door for Mozilla (Firefox) and Microsoft (IE) to do the same, meaning that for authors—the group already accused of being too lazy to do the right thing—the Web is about to become an ever-more fragmented mess, where the once-safe experimental feature known as -webkit- (and -moz- etc.) now will come to represent a much more fragile, questionable feature or implementation.

This is a terrible decision for the Web.