Akkam's Razor Radicalized on the internets since 1996.

All excerpts are quoted from the respective link(s).

• There’s No Place Like Home, Americans are Returning to Localism | Newgeography.com – Thriving neighborhood restaurants are one small data point in a larger trend I call the new localism. The basic premise: the longer people stay in their homes and communities, the more they identify with those places, and the greater their commitment to helping local businesses and institutions thrive, even in a downturn. Several factors are driving this process, including an aging population, suburbanization, the Internet, and an increased focus on family life. And even as the recession has begun to yield to recovery, our commitment to our local roots is only going to grow more profound. Evident before the recession, the new localism will shape how we live and work in the coming decades, and may even influence the course of our future politics.
• Project ‘Gaydar’: An MIT experiment raises new questions about online privacy – The Boston Globe – Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.
• The GOOD 100: Bulldozing Cities | GOOD – So, I have made a simple suggestion: that we redesign our city for the population that we actually have, not for the city we once were. Flint has lost 90,000 residents during the last 40 years, and those residents did not take their houses with them. Left behind is a city comprised of some vibrant neighborhoods, and some that are populated with empty houses, reminding the few residents still there that they live in a failed place.
• Corporate Communism | Crooks and Liars – [Corporate Communism is] a system that takes resources from the citizenry and redistributes it to a tiny elite….a handful of weak, uncompetitive and outdated corporations and industries are purchasing control of the American political process in order to stay in business using their cronyism. It is coming at the direct expense of the rest of us, and is a total betrayal of everything that represents America.
• the Teacher Salary Project – In this spirit, THE TEACHER SALARY PROJECT will become the story by and about those closest to the issues in our educational system-the 3.2 million teachers who spend every day in the classroom in every corner of the country. Through an interactive and evolving website informed by personal testimonies by and about America's best teachers-which will become the only digital archive of teachers' stories about teaching-and a feature-length documentary that brings together the richest of those online submissions, archival material, educational experts, student interviews, and a year of documenting the day-to-day lives and sacrifices of public school teachers, THE TEACHER SALARY PROJECT will bring an awareness to the real and imminent crisis in our educational system-how little we value our strongest, most committed, and most effective teachers, and the ripple effect this has on how our children learn and their potential for future success.
• Internet Archaeology – Internet Archaeology seeks to explore, recover, archive and showcase the graphic artifacts found within earlier Internet Culture. Established in 2009, the chief purpose of Internet Archaeology is to preserve these artifacts and acknowledge their importance in understanding the beginnings and birth of an Internet Culture.
• Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch – social computing within the enterprise is about everything, but the tools. It’s a philosophical and social corporate movement, a lifestyle, a new way of connecting and interacting with people, both inside and outside of the firewall; one where the main focus is not on the technology itself, but on the people behind it.
• The Telltale Wombs Of Lewiston, Maine – The U.S. health care payment system rewards doctors for taking action and doing procedures. This reality is so powerful that it hasn't just changed the individual behavior of doctors. Keller says that the specialties themselves have changed, bending like flowers to the sun, moving toward the source of heat.
• Birth of a Notion: Implicit Social Cognition and the "Birther" Movement – A part of the answer may lie in what’s called implicit social cognition, which involves the deep-rooted assumptions we all carry around and even act on without realizing it. Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji is a leader in implicit social cognition research. She excavates the hidden beliefs people hold by measuring how fast they make value judgments when shown a rapid-fire succession of stimuli, such as photographs of faces.
• Worldchanging: Bright Green: Worldchanging 101: An Anniversary Collection – To celebrate our sixth anniversary, we've created a collection of what you might think of as the Worldchanging canon: pieces that have had enduring popularity and that we think say something important. And it turns out the two overlap pretty well. After compiling a list of our most popular articles we noticed that a high proportion of our most read, forwarded and linked pieces not only represent groundbreaking work, they also highlight many of the core ideas we often discuss on Worldchanging.