Links for 2009-09-30

"Provided you take our word for it and don't go back into the archives, the A.V. Club's Oscar-O-Meter feature has quickly become the definitive tool for Oscar prognostication. Through a rigorously scientific process, our writers have quantified each prestige movie based on a set of criteria: Is it a literary adaptation? Is it topical without being too controversial? Risky without actually being provocative? Does it feature a star who lost weight, gained weight, or made some sort of radical Method transformation? Does it have a middlebrow sense of grandeur? And most importantly, will Academy members feel good about themselves when voting for it?"

"Researchers at Columbia University in New York have made the first electrical-readout nanomechanical resonators made from graphene. The devices, which consist of vibrating sheets of graphene suspended over micron-sized trenches, could be used as highly sensitive, robust, mass detectors. "

"This is what freaks out many of my fellow evangelical Christians. It seems to violate what they call the unity of the scriptures -- the idea that the Bible cannot and does not ever contradict itself.

That view is hard to square with the book of Jonah. It's hard to square with the fact of the book of Jonah, with its very existence. The book is a polemic, and we can't have a polemic without also having two poles -- two contrasting and opposing points of view. The author of Jonah takes sides. Whatever else that means, it demonstrates that there are sides to be taken. It means that there is more than one side, more than one identical view."

"Herkko Hietanen of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology tells his audience at the Berkman Center that "television is really broken." The medium isn't rising to its full potential, isn't providing consumers with programs when and where they want them. To set the scheduled for what you want to watch, you need to be at your television. And there are frustrating geographic restrictions on programming - Herkko wonders why it's hard to watch Finnish TV in the US. Television was created to be consumed - it lacks interactivity with broadcasters and other viewers. It forces consumers to sit through irrelavent commercials.

It could be so much better, he tells us. And it would be very hard to pitch a VC on a model of ad supported, broadcast over the air television today. "

"My friend and former business partner, Bo Peabody, has an op-ed in today's Washington Post titled "Twitter.org?" He argues that social media is extremely difficult to support via advertising, unlikely to make profits for venture capital investors, and is sufficiently important that we should try to build non-profit models to support emerging infrastructures like Twitter."