2013_08_01 Link Pile

August 1, 2013 in Links | Permalink

Tech

Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful . By Don Marti .
THE INSIDE STORY OF THE MOTO X: THE PHONE THAT REVEALS WHY GOOGLE BOUGHT MOTOROLA. By Steven Levy in Wired.
CW500: The rise of the machines — how devices are taking over the internet. By Bill Goodwin in ComputerWeekly.
Measuring the full impact of digital capital: Although largely uncounted, intangible digital assets may hold an important key to understanding competition and growth in the Internet era. By Jacques Bughin and James Manyika in McKinsey Quarterly.
Intel Drops Facial Recognition From TV Plans for Now. By Jeffrey Burt in eWeek.

Handbasket to hell

Female genital mutilation: Still bleeding — A barbaric practice is becoming a bit rarer and less popular. In The Economist.
Projected climate change moves much faster than land vertebrates have evolved: Species that survive future warming probably won’t do it by evolving. By Scott K. Johnson in Ars Technica.
If not for clouds and nitrogen, Earth could be an uninhabitable hell right now: New model suggests a Venus-like planet is closer than we think. By John Timmer in Ars Technica.
Million-browser botnet, by Jeremiah Grossman and Matt Johansen in Blackhat Briefings.

Etc.

Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teaching List of 87 Essential Films Every Aspiring Director Should See In Open Culture.
Tides control the geysers of Enceladus. In Physics World. A story based on An observed correlation between plume activity and tidal stresses on Enceladus, by M. M. Hedman, C. M. Gosmeyer, P. D. Nicholson, C. Sotin, R. H. Brown, R. N. Clark, K. H. Baines, B. J. Buratti and M. R. Showalter in Nature. Pretty cool. Enceladus is a moon of Saturn with an eliptical orbit that has cracks that look like tiger stripes that open up and spew geysers of water and ice out into space for hundreds of kilometers when the tide is right. Then the spew falls back as snow covering the moon’s craters.
Wikipedia Zero: