Joelle Nebbe-Mornod's Public Library

2012 will be a celebration of Turing’s life and scientific impact, with a number of major events taking place throughout the year. Most of these will be linked to places with special significance in Turing’s life, such as Cambridge, Manchester and Bletchley Park.

www.cs.swan.ac.uk/turing2012 - Preview

"# A recent analysis of the top journals in six sub-disciplines of Psychology from 2003-2007 revealed that 68% of subjects came from the US, and 96% of subjects were from Western industrialised countries, specifically North America, Europe, Australia, and Israel (Arnett, 2008) reflecting the academics country of residence.
# This means that 96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world’s population.
# And a randomly selected American undergraduate is more than 4000 times more likely to be a research participant than is a randomly selected person from outside of the West."

www.vaginadentatablog.net/?p=139 - Preview

"4. Explain password rules

When asking customers to provide an email and password, clearly state the “rules” of the password up front (minimum number of characters, required numeric value etc)."

www.getelastic.com/registration-tips - Preview

ecommerce report

""Internally, we call it Miva Merchant SaaS. If you go to our website, it's just called Miva Merchant. I think this is a clear thing to mention. We are offering the same product that our hosts are offering and so the benefit is about convenience and having one source. A lot of people like to have only one place to call, one source for help, and one source for support. The product is identical to what you would get from any of our hosting partners. Now, granted we're following the absolute best practices and so this would be like any one of our web hosting providers, but if you come to our website, it's just called Miva Merchant and it comes in three versions, with monthly prices at $59.95, $89.95, and $129.95"

www.practicalecommerce.com/...nches-In-house-Hosted-Platform - Preview

"This year companies are reporting their IT spend is averaging 2.3% of sales, compared to 1.8% last year. -- Website sales represent a significant proportion of total sales for most fashion industry companies at 6.3% of total sales. -- The majority of companies have websites that are in profit (68%) and half say they achieve profitability within the first year of operation. However, this leaves a third that are still not trading profitably. -- Of those that are profitable, 68% say their website is more profitable than their stores. -- 67% of retailers are currently able to offer their customers the chance to return products bought online at the store. -- However, checking store stock levels from the website, a capability that consumers are particularly keen on, is currently offered by only 30% of companies. "

www.melodika.net/index.php - Preview

ecommerce report

www.womenintechnology.co.uk/attracting-diverse-candidates - Preview

"While it’s true that this technique does not measure everything that determines a site’s ease of browsing, that can also be a strength. By isolating the site structure – by removing other variables at this early stage of design – we can more clearly see how the tree itself performs, and revise until we have a solid structure. We can then move on in the design process with confidence. It’s like unit-testing a site’s organisation and labeling. Or as my colleague Sam Ng says, “Think of it as analytics for a website you haven’t built yet.”
"

www.boxesandarrows.com/...tree-testing - Preview

"What do ornamental graphics bring to the users experience? We're not sure. We can't find any evidence they help users trust a site better or make it seem more professional or friendly. While they can reduce the density of large text blocks, there are more effective layout techniques to get the same result."

www.uie.com/...deciding_when_graphics_help - Preview

"Masonry is a layout plugin for jQuery. Think of it as the flip side of CSS floats. Whereas floating arranges elements horizontally then vertically, Masonry arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid. The result minimizes vertical gaps between elements of varying height, just like a mason fitting stones in a wall."

desandro.com/...jquery-masonry - Preview

jquery javascript layout

"Next Jump also handles the rewards programs that offer deals to loyal customers of companies like Dell, Borders and Hilton Hotels, and similar programs for membership organizations like AARP and the American Federation of Teachers. More than 100 million Americans have access to Next Jump’s e-commerce marketplace, and 10 million a year are customers.

As it has quietly expanded, Next Jump has been gathering data, and not only from companies and customers. It also gets credit-card transaction data from American Express and MasterCard. This vast trove — accumulated over years — is the company’s most precious asset, analysts say.

Next Jump analyzes that data to draw inferences about what a person would be likely to buy, and at what price. Its network also includes 28,000 retailers who can specify the characteristics of customers — age, location, income, for example — that they are most interested in luring with certain products."

www.stoweboyd.com/...-better-conversion-online.html - Preview

“The compulsory presence of religious symbols in public schools runs counter to the freedom of religion and the freedom of thought,” said NSS Honorary Associate and MEP Sophie in ’t Veld this week. “Public institutions should respect and represent all citizens, regardless of religion or belief, political affiliation, or otherwise. Public institutions like courts, public schools, public hospitals and so on, should be neutral.”

www.secularism.org.uk/s-rally-to-defend-freedom.html - Preview

The paper aims to answer a fundamental question: when do these ubiquitous TOS agreements actually become binding contracts? We discuss how courts have reacted to efforts by service providers to enforce TOS, and suggest best practices for service providers to follow in presenting terms to a user and for seeking his or her agreement to them.

The white paper examines both clickwrap agreements—whereby service providers require the user to click an “I Agree” button next to the terms—and browsewrap agreements—whereby service providers try to characterize one's continued use of the website as constituting “agreement” to a posted set of terms. While neither method automatically creates enforceable contracts, some presentations may still be upheld even if the user never actually reads and understands the terms. The key is whether the service provider allows the user reasonable notice and opportunity to review the terms before using the website or service.

www.eff.org/...ind-ways-users-agree-online-te - Preview

the stage version of Hamlet starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart has been made into a film, and it will air on BBC 2 on December 26th. The BBC has the info (look to the right, fourth panel down). I hope they come out with it on BBC America, or Blu-ray! I wish I could’ve seen the stage version (oh, outrageous fortune! — but we all suffer slings and arrows sometimes) but this’ll do in its stead.

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...warts-hamlet-to-air-this-month - Preview

Some may call this the, anticipation web, intention web, or forward looking web, but regardless of the name, there are some unique opportunities: 1) People can now use their social relationships that have similar goals or events on their cal and improve their experience. 2) They can also identify who in their social circles are most likely going where, increasing their knowledge of top events. 3) This provides businesses with the ability to listen to provide highly contextualized offerings and experiences for those explicitly stating their intents. Once a listening strategy is developed, expect Social CRM to be in the foreground mining, organizing, and making this data actionable.

www.web-strategist.com/...st-enough-the-intent-based-web - Preview

Dr. Martin writes that the main reason companies find it difficult to realize innovations is that most people in corporations are trained in analytical thinking and focused on reliability and consistency. They are focused on making the "factory" and related processes better, faster, and cheaper to produce existing offerings.

The opposite of reliability is a focus on validity. Dr. Martin defines validity as seeking to find the "correct" answer to a complex problem, not the most reliable or predictable, and to find new knowledge that will lead to the development of new markets, new business models, new products, etc.

Businesses are organized to deliver and value consistent results. The main problem that derives from a reliability focus which is based on analytical thinking is that business leaders depend on past activity to make decisions about future direction.

This leads companies into stagnation and a lack of focus on what customers want and need. Competitors that find unmet customers needs and deliver compelling new value will grow and succeed.

www.innovationtools.com/...innovationblog-detail.asp - Preview

"Camel lets you create the Enterprise Integration Patterns to implement routing and mediation rules in either a Java based Domain Specific Language (or Fluent API), via Spring based Xml Configuration files or via the Scala DSL. This means you get smart completion of routing rules in your IDE whether in your Java, Scala or XML editor.

Apache Camel uses URIs so that it can easily work directly with any kind of Transport or messaging model such as HTTP, ActiveMQ, JMS, JBI, SCA, MINA or CXF Bus API together with working with pluggable Data Format options. Apache Camel is a small library which has minimal dependencies for easy embedding in any Java application. Apache Camel lets you work with the same API regardless which kind of Transport used, so learn the API once and you will be able to interact with all the Components that is provided out-of-the-box."

camel.apache.org - Preview

"Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who did ask for more, the perception being that women who asked were "less nice." As one of the researchers, Hannah Riley Bowles, told the Post:

"What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not," Bowles said. "They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not."

My experience and this study indicate there can be a social cost when women negotiate. A cost that is consistent with the findings of psychiatrist Anna Fels: when we are giving something to someone else, we are feminine; when we are asking for something from someone, we are not.

When men ask for something, they are being proactive; when women ask, they are being pushy. It's a double standard to be sure, but it's also a double bind — if we don't ask, we don't get; if we do ask, we may be shunned. "

blogs.harvardbusiness.org/...can_nice_girls_negotiate.html - Preview

feminism gender business

"What’s the mathematical model underlying the two? Well, it’s a basically pragmatic approach to team-building:

* teams try to recruit people with varied skills or attributes
* people join based on judging what they can add to the team
* the people joining a team assess the team as a whole, rather than looking at every member
* the team accepts someone based on what they think the person can contribute
* people leave when there’s lots of members who offer the same attributes they do
* people always look for teams where they can contribute more
* when membership n a team is stable, the team grows by merging with other teams"

www.raphkoster.com/...-both-driven-by-team-formation - Preview

"I think it's good news. I don't think open source is going away. It's here to stay. The world is increasingly moving to a hybrid world: a combination of on-premises and cloud computing. We're not going to see a 100 percent cloud world.

If I look at our portfolio, even our "open-source companies" like Pentaho, OpenX, and DimDim are turning to the cloud to monetize their open-source software assets.

Open source provides a convenient on-ramp and off-ramp for customers, helping them evaluate the software at low to no cost and also gives a free (as in cost and as in freedom) exit in case things go wrong. Between that entrance and exit is a ripe opportunity to make a lot of money by delivering value to customers."

news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10408562-16.html - Preview

cloud open open-source

"Serving Magento PHP files is primarily a CPU bound task"

www.optaros.com/...magento-performance-cloud - Preview