Hurricane Sandy in Photos →
I'm not sure if the satellite photo of the storm, this shot of an empty Grand Central station, or the shot of an empty NYC highway is more shocking.
Can Austin Keep Itself Weird? →
In November, Austin will become the American home of Grand Prix Formula One racing: Big-name sponsors, racecars going 180 miles an hour, $4,300 tickets to V.I.P. seating, Champagne and helicopters flying wealthy fans from locations all over the city to the new $450 million race facility built by a bond trader and a billionaire. For three days, the global elite who follow Grand Prix racing will touch down in Austin from Abu Dhabi before taking off again three days later for São Paulo or Monaco. It seems a strange departure, frankly, for a city whose reputation was built on sunshine, tacos, good coffee and better margaritas, Willie Nelson, Longhorn football and barbecue.
As all "cool" places inevitably due, Austin appears to be struggling maintaining it's uniqueness in the face of growth.
Sanctuary at the Dutch Goose
I didn't realize until people started taking pictures that I had ended up on a bench surrounded by lovely Sanctuary ladies.
Stanford Researchers Show the Economic Value of Effective Supervisors →
Good bosses are a good deal better than bad ones. Replacing a supervisor from the bottom 10 percent of the pool with one from the top 10 percent increases output about as much as adding a 10th worker to a nine-worker team.
That it's better to have a good manager than a poor one isn't very surprising. But the authors' two other findings are a bit more striking. The main impact effective supervisors have on their employees doesn't come from motivating or supervising them per se, it comes from teaching them better work methods.
Finally, A Practical Use for Algebra →
Academic researchers have improved wireless bandwidth by an order of magnitude—not by adding base stations, tapping more spectrum, or cranking up transmitter wattage, but by using algebra to eliminate the network-clogging task of resending dropped packets of data.(via The Brief)
The Benghazi Embarrassment →
The embarrassment of the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi is not that it happened. America has its victories against terrorism, and its defeats, and the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three American security personnel represents one defeat in a long war. The embarrassment is that political culture in America is such that we can't have an adult conversation about the lessons of Benghazi.
Learnable Programming →
Programming has to work like this. Programmers must be able to read the vocabulary, follow the flow, and see the state. Programmers have to create by reacting and create by abstracting. Assume that these are requirements. Given these requirements, how do we redesign programming?
An interesting essay on the fundamental attributes of programming, programming languages, and programming environments that should make you think about how we teach and learn programming in the future.
Surface Reviews Are Out →
Ars Technica and Wired have well-balanced reviews of the Surface. It competes with the iPad in some places and beats Android in most, but does silly Windows RT things in others. The hardware looks to be much better than the software at the moment.
Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong →
The idea that "social networks" and "social media" sites created a social web is pervasive. Everyone behaves as if the traffic your stories receive from the social networks (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, StumbleUpon) is the same as all of your social traffic. I began to wonder if I was wrong. Or at least that what I had experienced was a niche phenomenon and most people's web time was not filled with Gchatted and emailed links. I began to think that perhaps Facebook and Twitter has dramatically expanded the volume of -- at the very least -- linksharing that takes place.
But it's not true; a vast majority of traffic to The Atlantic's site is from links without referrer headers, that is, links somehow shared outside of the web, whether email, IM, or text. Alexis Madrigal digs into this alternate history of the social web and the data on it and what it means for our relationship with content and social networks.