dekay.org

"The Oscar nominees were announced this morning, which means it's time to get out your scorecards to see who's winning in the eternal struggle between the MPAA vs. the Internet. (Hint: It's not the MPAA.) I've been tracking the distribution of Oscar-nominated films every year, culminating with the release of six years of piracy data last year. I've updated those spreadsheets with this year's 26 nominees, for a total of 211 films from the last seven years."

"How do you read such a graph? Is this the ideal way to depict this sort of information? If you wanted to know which part of the state was most populous, how would you go about figuring it out? Researchers have developed conflicting models to explain how it's done. One model suggests that people reading this kind of graph must cycle between the different parts in order to understand it. This makes some sense: to answer our question about population, you'd have to look back and forth between the legend and the colors on the map."

"Construction Could Begin 2010, Completed 2015 Innogy Nordsee 1 will be built 40 kilometers north of the island of Juist and cover an area of sea about 150 square kilometers in size. Innogy expects to receive permitting approval later in 2009, with construction beginning in 2010, the first turbines producing power a year later, and the entire wind farm completed in 2015. Total costs for the project are expected to run to €2.8 billion ($3.7 billion). Based on wind speeds in the region, project developers expect the wind farm to produce over 3 TWh of electricity when fully completed."

"Sustainability is the buzzword of the day. In a recent study, the global PR firm Weber Shandwick found that, aside from chief executive officers, chief sustainability officers were the most-wanted executives for business conferences. Companies are doing all they can to ensure their survival right now. Innovest Strategic Value Advisors has pulled together a list of 100 stalwart companies poised to survive past all others. These are the companies that stand the best chance to still be around in the year 2109. Let's hope a recession in 2108 doesn't knock them out."

"For your “public” business website, a Blog seems to make more sense. It is far more useful for getting your specific message out, without changes being made by someone else. When you control the content, you can control the image and overall message. Because a Blog allows for “permanent” pages, such as product or service descriptions, as well as “article” posts similar to an online newspaper, it allows any business to fill their website with new and interesting content while providing easier management of static information. However, a Wiki fits well as a format for a customer support resource (such as a publically-accessible “knowledge database” website). A Wiki is also an excellent choice for any project involving collaboration between 3 or more people. As expected, installation of either of these server solutions can be attempted by anyone but Phonewire does provide these technologies as a managed hosted solution so you can focus on your content and let us worry about everythi

"“Is there a decent spreadsheet for OS Ⅹ other than Excel?”"

"…and much more! The important difference between Resolver One and traditional spreadsheets is that Resolver One makes scripting a first-class citizen, not an afterthought. In Resolver One, the spreadsheet is the program. As you change your formulae, Python code is generated and executed, with the results displayed as values in the grid. You can then edit the code, define your own functions and use programming constructs that give you unlimited power and flexibility." OMG, this is textmate for spreadsheets?

"Conclusions Users of Excel for analyses involving gene names should be aware of this problem, which can cause genes, including medically important ones, to be lost from view and which has contaminated even carefully curated public databases. We provide work-arounds and scripts for circumventing the problem." LOL.

"Here are several scary but true comparisons, measuring daily global auto deaths against higher profile tragedies which have been embedded into our collective consciousness: 1) Every day more people are killed in auto related deaths than in the 9⁄11 attacks on America. 2) Every day, about 3 times more woman, children, and men are killed in auto related deaths than in the recent Gaza conflict. 3) Every day, more than twice as many people perish in auto deaths than in Hurricane Katrina. 4) The daily toll from traffic accidents is equivalent to 15 plane crashes, each with 200 passengers aboard."

"As Bill mentioned in an earlier post, we don’t want to limit this blog to just the principles and patterns found in the book. For that you can check out our Explore the Book section. In the spirit of that, Ⅰ want to share an additional set of principles and patterns Ⅰ have been using for RIA design. While the book takes a much more consumer web site orientation, these concepts are central to enterprise application and web productivity application design and more broad than those discussed in the book. This is the first article in a three part series."

"Simple:Press The Forum Plugin for WordPress Simple:Press is a feature rich forum plugin for WordPress. It fully integrates into your WP based site utilising the same user records and database and displaying on a single WP page. It is fully customisable and comes with a number of skins and sets of icons to get your started. Current users have shown it to be fully scaleable whether your site membership numbers the tens or the thousands. Through it’s powerful and flexible permissions system it is suitable for those who wish to run private, specialist forums with invited members but is equally able to accommodate open, public forums that allow guest posting. Also included is a Private Messaging sub-system, the ability to link blog posts with forum topics, the capability to extend the forum display with custom code, a number of template tags for use outside of the forums, extensive online help that explains every option and full language support. For a more comprehensive list please s