"A year after a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself ablaze, dissent has spread across the Middle East, to Europe and the US, reshaping global politics and redefining people power."
The Protester is Time's 2011 Person of the Year.
posted by XQUZYPHYR
on Dec 14, 2011 -
42 comments
From 1935 to 1951, Time Magazine bridged the gap between print & radio news reporting and the new visual medium of film, with
March of Time: award-winning newsreel reports that were a combination of objective documentary, dramatized fiction and pro-American, anti-totalitarian propaganda. They “often
tackled subjects and themes that audiences weren’t used to seeing —
foreign affairs,
social trends, public-health issues — and did so with a combination of panache and subterfuge that today seems either absurd or visionary.”
(Previous two links have autoplaying video.) By 1937, the short films were being seen by as many as 26 million people every month and
may have helped steer public opinion on numerous issues,
including (
eventually) America’s
entry to WWII. Video samples are available at
Time.com, the
March of Time Facebook page and the entire collection is available online,
(free registration required) at
HBO Archives. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Aug 22, 2011 -
8 comments
Mind Reading: The Researchers Who Analyzed All the Porn on the Internet. "Searching all the porn on the Internet might not seem like the most scientifically productive activity, but computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam did it anyway. For their new book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire, Ogas and Gaddam analyzed the results of 400 million online searches for porn and uncovered some startling insights into what men and women may really want from each other — at least sexually."
[more inside]
posted by bwg
on Jun 2, 2011 -
85 comments
"Normal" human pregnancies last 40 weeks, right? Well, no; they can vary quite a bit by the mother's
race,
age,
number of previous children,
family history of delivering early or late,
home state,
work habits, and even
the fetus' HLA type. So where does that "40 week" thing come from?
Oh, dear. So check out this
super-nerdy pregnancy statistics website, from an engineer mom who is
collecting data from the public (see the
raw data and
auto-generated graphs, and
read the FAQ about the survey, with more cool graphs). Looking for
day-by-day probabilities on when that baby's due? This would be
your stats table with daily prediction (adjust dates at top of page as needed). Of course, you could always shut up your constantly inquiring relatives and friends
another way.
posted by Asparagirl
on Dec 16, 2010 -
45 comments
It has applications in
Economics,
Biology,
Pharmaceuticals, and
is rooted in State Space Modeling, which with
Kalman Filtering (
paper,
breakdown [warning: long]) was used in the
Apollo program.
Dynamic Linear Models are gaining in popularity. There exists an
R package, and both
a short doc and
a really great (read: worth buying) book (sorry, not a download, but
here's chapter 2) by
Giovanni Petris,
Sonia Petrone, and Patrizia Campagnoli with
its own little website.
posted by JoeXIII007
on Jul 30, 2010 -
14 comments
Year On Earth breaks it down, explaining the complicated mechanics involved in trying to determine how long a year really is, why seasons and ice ages happen, and how not all years are created equal.
posted by loquacious
on Jul 5, 2010 -
22 comments
Time's comprehensive archives allow us to see how the magazine's discussions of
homosexuality have evolved from pathologizing and stereotyping . . . to awkward attempts to view gays humanely while continuing to refer to their sexual orientation as a disease . . . to a gradual acceptance of gays as upstanding members of society who are struggling for equal rights. Articles from 1956, 1966, 1969, 1975, and 1979 inside.
[more inside]
posted by Jaltcoh
on Jun 20, 2010 -
27 comments
"The story of the year was a weak economy that could have been much, much weaker. Thank the man who runs the Federal Reserve, our mild-mannered economic overlord."
Ben Bernanke is Time's 2009 Person of the Year. Runners-up include General Stanley McChrystal, Nancy Pelosi, and Neda Agha-Soltan.
posted by XQUZYPHYR
on Dec 16, 2009 -
75 comments
