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The Protester -Person of the Year 2011- Printout – TIME
Really makes you wonder what type of system actually works – communism failed, dictatorship usually reaches a violent end, and looking at US & India, democracy also has its pitfalls once the politicians game the system.
“Globalization and going viral have been the catchphrases of the networked 21st century. But until now the former has mainly referred to a fluid worldwide economy managed by important people, and the latter has mostly meant cute-animal videos and songs by nobodies. This year, do-it-yourself democratic politics became globalized, and real live protest went massively viral. But as they’ve rejuvenated and enlarged the idea of democracy, the protesters, and the rest of us, are discovering that democracy is difficult and sometimes a little scary. Because deciding what you don’t want is a lot easier than deciding and implementing what you do want, and once everybody has a say, everybody has a say. No one knows how the revolutions will play out: A bumpy road to stable democracy, as in America two centuries ago? Radicals’ taking over, as in France just after the bliss and very heaven? Or quick counterrevolution, as in France 60 years later? The mostly liberal, secular young people who made the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt last winter have been subordinated, if not sidelined, by better-disciplined political organizations. And they all agree it’s partly their own fault, a function of naiveté about the realities of democratic politics.”-
Globalization and going viral have been the catchphrases of the networked 21st century. But until now the former has mainly referred to a fluid worldwide economy managed by important people, and the latter has mostly meant cute-animal videos and songs by nobodies. This year, do-it-yourself democratic politics became globalized, and real live protest went massively viral. But as they’ve rejuvenated and enlarged the idea of democracy, the protesters, and the rest of us, are discovering that democracy is difficult and sometimes a little scary. Because deciding what you don’t want is a lot easier than deciding and implementing what you do want, and once everybody has a say, everybody has a say. No one knows how the revolutions will play out: A bumpy road to stable democracy, as in America two centuries ago? Radicals’ taking over, as in France just after the bliss and very heaven? Or quick counterrevolution, as in France 60 years later? The mostly liberal, secular young people who made the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt last winter have been subordinated, if not sidelined, by better-disciplined political organizations. And they all agree it’s partly their own fault, a function of naiveté about the realities of democratic politics.
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Another useful hack to gain camera stability without a full fledged tripod
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DIY Lighting Hacks for Digital Photographers
A pretty useful collection to improve your flash lighting
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Make a diffuser (images at the bottom of the post) for you flash. Interesting set of materials used, and the results seem to be pretty effective too.
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flash photography essentials « Neil vN – tangents
A very helpful article that gets you started with the basics of flash photography. One point in particular that is a striking difference between flash & general shooting is that the shutter speed does not have impact on exposure as long as you are in the sync speed range.
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Newton Papers – Cambridge Digital Library – University of Cambridge
Very interesting initiative that has digitized many of Newton’s notebooks\papers. Not all the notes are easy to decipher though.
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You Have Downloaded – We show what you downloaded
A site that tells you what stuff you have downloaded using torrents
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Canon DLC: Article: Back-Button Auto Focus Explained
Using the Custom Functions to change the default behaviour of the shutter half press & AE lock buttons. This can be very useful if you don’t want the focus to get affected on the shutter half press.
Author: Aditya
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Interesting links (weekly)
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The Protester -Person of the Year 2011- Printout – TIME
Really makes you wonder what type of system actually works – communism failed, dictatorship usually reaches a violent end, and looking at US & India, democracy also has its pitfalls once the politicians game the system.
“Globalization and going viral have been the catchphrases of the networked 21st century. But until now the former has mainly referred to a fluid worldwide economy managed by important people, and the latter has mostly meant cute-animal videos and songs by nobodies. This year, do-it-yourself democratic politics became globalized, and real live protest went massively viral. But as they’ve rejuvenated and enlarged the idea of democracy, the protesters, and the rest of us, are discovering that democracy is difficult and sometimes a little scary. Because deciding what you don’t want is a lot easier than deciding and implementing what you do want, and once everybody has a say, everybody has a say. No one knows how the revolutions will play out: A bumpy road to stable democracy, as in America two centuries ago? Radicals’ taking over, as in France just after the bliss and very heaven? Or quick counterrevolution, as in France 60 years later? The mostly liberal, secular young people who made the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt last winter have been subordinated, if not sidelined, by better-disciplined political organizations. And they all agree it’s partly their own fault, a function of naiveté about the realities of democratic politics.”Tags: time, revolution, protest
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String Tripod
Another useful hack to gain camera stability without a full fledged tripod
Tags: photography, diy, tutorial, camera, tripod
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DIY Lighting Hacks for Digital Photographers
A pretty useful collection to improve your flash lighting
Tags: photography, diy, lighting, hacks, tutorials
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DIY Reflector-Diffuser
Make a diffuser (images at the bottom of the post) for you flash. Interesting set of materials used, and the results seem to be pretty effective too.
Tags: flash, photography, diffuser, diy, lighting, tutorial, howto
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flash photography essentials « Neil vN – tangents
A very helpful article that gets you started with the basics of flash photography. One point in particular that is a striking difference between flash & general shooting is that the shutter speed does not have impact on exposure as long as you are in the sync speed range.
Tags: flash, photography, tips
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Newton Papers – Cambridge Digital Library – University of Cambridge
Very interesting initiative that has digitized many of Newton’s notebooks\papers. Not all the notes are easy to decipher though.
Tags: university, newton, digital library, science, notes
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You Have Downloaded – We show what you downloaded
A site that tells you what stuff you have downloaded using torrents
Tags: torrent, downloads, tracking
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Canon DLC: Article: Back-Button Auto Focus Explained
Using the Custom Functions to change the default behaviour of the shutter half press & AE lock buttons. This can be very useful if you don’t want the focus to get affected on the shutter half press.
Tags: canon, photography, settings, focus
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Interesting links (weekly)
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My Mother’s blog. It’s in Bengali & deals with psychology and spirituality.
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17-year-old wins 100k for creating cancer-killing nanoparticle | Geek.com
Another step towards longevity?
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5 Minutes on The Verge: Paul Thurrott | The Verge
Very interesting thoughts:
“I make fun of Kinect, but it’s important to see this as what it is: The incredibly unsophisticated predecessor of tomorrow’s Skynet Terminator robots. On that note, I hope they don’t remember what I said about them.” -
Android: A visual history | The Verge
Quite a comprehensive article. Google did do some things right and before Apple, after all.
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FAQ: What does a more expensive lens really buy you? from Adorama Learning Center
In case you ever wondered, this article explains quite a bit.
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How To Use A Monopod & Multi-Purpose Tripod
There are quite a few ways to use a monopod it seems, and treating it like a tripod & putting it in front of you is the weakest option of them all.
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Waldo Jaquith – On the impracticality of a cheeseburger.
In case you ever wondered what kind of progress we have made as a civilization, this articles the best example you can find.
“A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.”-
A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.
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As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
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How to Land Your Kid in Therapy – Magazine – The Atlantic
Pretty interesting article on the pursuit of happiness – maybe we aren’t designed to feel happy all the time.
“Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy.”
“Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing. But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.”-
Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy
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Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing
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But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaste
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Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”
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When ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his performance.
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In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self-esteem.
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Kids who always have problems solved for them believe that they don’t know how to solve problems. And they’re right—they don’t.
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parents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they deserve special treatment
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The irony is that measures of self-esteem are poor predictors of how content a person will be, especially if the self-esteem comes from constant accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment. According to Jean Twenge, research shows that much better predictors of life fulfillment and success are perseverance, resiliency, and reality-testing—qualities that people need so they can navigate the day-to-day.
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“Research shows that people get more satisfaction from working hard at one thing, and that those who always need to have choices and keep their options open get left behind,” Schwartz told me. “I’m not saying don’t let your kid try out various interests or activities. I’m saying give them choices, but within reason. Most parents tell kids, ‘You can do anything you want, you can quit any time, you can try this other thing if you’re not 100 percent satisfied with the other.’ It’s no wonder they live their lives that way as adults, too.”
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underlying all this parental angst is the hopeful belief that if we just make the right choices, that if we just do things a certain way, our kids will turn out to be not just happy adults, but adults that make us happy. This is a misguided notion, because while nurture certainly matters, it doesn’t completely trump nature, and different kinds of nurture work for different kinds of kids (which explains why siblings can have very different experiences of their childhoods under the same roof). We can expose our kids to art, but we can’t teach them creativity. We can try to protect them from nasty classmates and bad grades and all kinds of rejection and their own limitations, but eventually they will bump up against these things anyway. In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up. Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do—and some letting go.
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Why Apple’s cheap | Felix Salmon
The journey has definitely been interesting for Apple
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So there’s more than just ohm\mho:
“An ananym is a word whose spelling is derived by reversing the spelling of another word. It is therefore a special type of anagram.” -
Travel Photo Clichés and How to Avoid Them – NYTimes.com
Useful tips by Michael Freeman (photographer & author of Photographer’s Eye\Mind books)
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Kodak’s long fade to black – latimes.com
The Kodak moment gives way to the iPhone moment.
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Kindle Fire Usability Findings (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
Steve Jobs was onto something with the 10″ form factor for tablets, it seems. This study indicates how difficult it is to use regular (desktop versions) websites on a 7″ tablet. Even though the screen is much larger, the user experience is better with the mobile version of a site on a 7″ screen.
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On Magazines and the iPad — carpeaqua by Justin Williams
The user experience is pretty messed up it seems, even after the introduction of Newsstand.
This also indicates why Android has trouble with user experience (touch responsiveness & smoothness in particular). It all depends on the designer in the end, and iOS is no exception. -
The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2011
Also serves as a roundup of the major events of the year
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