1. Five of Satya Nadella's 25 tweets. He's expected to be named Microsoft's new CEO any minute now.
"HTML5 - what fun!
Bing on Yahoo!
Bing IT On!
azuring away today!
machine learning!"
"In more than five years of activity, the Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) produced an impressive series of projects, all developed with open source software, shared online and documented in a way that allows everybody to copy, improve, abuse or simply use them. This approach situates F.A.T. Lab in a long tradition of DIY, processual, sharable artistic practices based on instructionals, and reveals a democratic idea of art where Fluxus scores meet hacker culture (and rap music).
Featuring texts by Régine Debatty, Evan Roth, Domenico Quaranta, Geraldine Juárez and Randy Sarafan, The F.A.T. Manual is a selection of more that 100 projects, done in the belief that printing these bits on paper will allow them to spread in a different way, infiltrate other contexts, and germinate. An archive, a catalogue, a user manual and a software handbook documenting five years of thug life, pop culture and research and development."
+ E.g. Evan Roth's 2007 project: "Hip-Hop Pop-Ups is an online mp3 player that pops up the websites of Kanye West’s favorite brands in real time as he raps them."
3. A startup is trying to get around the standard stock-option rules.
"The company, Equidate, which opened its doors on Thursday, says it will allow start-up employees to sell the rights to the economic upside (or downside) of their shares, without actually transferring ownership of the shares. In other words, in exchange for a shot of cash, the employee would agree to forfeit any gains in a future initial public offering. (The employee would retain the voting rights of a shareholder.)
The idea is sure to provoke skepticism from start-ups and their legal teams, which take pains to limit the universe of owners of their stock. Start-ups have clamped down on secondary transactions in recent years, forcing companies like SecondMarket and SharesPost — two pioneers of secondary markets in private stock — to alter their business models. Equidate hopes to get around these restrictions by simulating the financial effects of a sale of shares without a sale actually taking place."
4. Academic Torrents places research datasets into a decentralized distribution network.
"A robust distributed replication design allows libraries to utilize this system as their backbone. Providing fault tolerant hosting of curated data for a university, research lab, or home library. When libraries have data on-site, bandwidth and time are saved. Also, this system can be used as the foundation of a new open-access publishing system where libraries manage data instead of licenses for external data sources.
The academic torrents network is built for researchers, by researchers. Its distributed peer-to-peer library system automatically replicates your datasets on many servers, so you don't have to worry about managing your own servers or file availability. Everyone who has data becomes a mirror for those data so the system is fault-tolerant."
5. A typewriter art ad that ran in the New York Times on Sunday, March 20, 1881.
This would make it the oldest extant piece of typewriter art that I've come across. Also, the process involved more than a typewriter.
Thanks Jacob!
Today's 1957 English Usage Tip:
analyse is the standard Brit. spelling, analyze, US; Americans may take comfort in the fact that the -yze ending was accepted by Johnson and according to OED is 'historically defensible.'
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