: This Week’s Top Stories on Pulse →
This was a banner week for Android news as Steve Wozniak’s statements about the increasingly popular Android system took several spots on our list. Add some helpful hints to excel in the workplace, awe-inspiring photos, and science news and you have your weekend reading list. Make sure you…
Using last.fm Data to Map Geographic Flow of Music
By tapping into the last.fm API, these Irish researchers modeled the geographic flow of musical influence. They were able to identify where certain tastes frequently originated, and draw a hierarchy of influential cities (like the chart shown above for North America).
Surprisingly, the size of a city doesn’t associate very strongly with how influential it is. That means that despite its enormous size, NYC isn’t that much more influential than Portland or Austin. There are prevailing theories that large cities are the drivers of cultural invention, but this seems to show (for music, at least) that a connected online world is leveling that playing field.
Also, they have a graph displaying “Normalized Radiohead vs. Normalized Coldplay”, which has to go down as one of the best figures in a research paper, ever.
(via arXiv)
Testing For Dummies: Testing →
We thought we’d share some information on our testing process.
My name is David Blooman, I am the principal tester for responsive news, all questions and queries can be sent to me at david.blooman@bbc.co.uk. Twitter @davey_blooman
When testing the devices, there are 4 main areas to…
On Being Blog: Shoah: A Table of Elements →
by Dov Abramson, guest contributor
“The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz), teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary nor congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely…
DEREK WEBB: Giving it Away: How Free Music Makes More Than Sense →
Music matters. It’s so integral and pervasive in our culture that it almost feels invisible. It’s even hard to imagine walking into almost any store without hearing music overhead. Culture provides a constant soundtrack to our lives. So it’s no wonder there’s so much discussion and debate…
DC Women Kicking Ass: DC Comics SDCC panels: uncomfortable questions about female creators/characters →
The DC Comics panels at SDCC have been filled with what I being told are uncomfortable and awkward moments around the issues of female creators and characters.
Much of this is being driven by a woman attending the DC panels with her young daughter. From people I’ve spoken to the daughter is a…
Bus-Size Asteroid to Give Earth Close Shave
A small asteroid will make an extremely close pass by Earth (right about NOW!!!), coming much nearer than the moon, but the space rock poses no danger of impacting our planet, NASA scientists say.
