Email from people at FlattR. What is FlattR- social micropayments. like small Paypal button that gives a fraction of your monthly budget (say 2 euros) to people you retweet/like (called Flattered in this social media service).
Some angels are smiling over some bays , it seems. congrats FlattR and their team (which includes tech team of largest bit torrent search engine in the world). Apparently this was done in time for the royal wedding.
Important service announcement
Hello!
Flattr’s first year has been great. And not just for us but for tens of thousands of bloggers, podcasters, developers, designers and other creators out there. Just ask Tim. We’re now making an important change to the service, one which should open the floodgates of Flattr, if you will.
From May 1st we no longer require users to flattr others before they can be flattrd. Or in other words, it’s not mandatory to add money to your account to have an active Flattr button.
How does this affect you?
If you’re mainly using Flattr to make payments you will soon have much more content to flattr.If you’re using Flattr both to make and receive payments then you no longer need to check your balance at the end of each month to see whether your Flattr button is still active or not. It is and always will be.
If your Flattr button was once deactivated because balance dropped to zero, it is now active again. Forever.
This makes Flattr simpler
We have good reasons for making this change and we’ve just added a post about it on our blog. In a nutshell, we just didn’t need to force the give before you get principle onto people. During the the last year we’ve learned that people want to flattr the content they like and therefore we decided to drop any rules that made the service restrictive or outright complicated.We hope you’ll like the simpler more straightforward Flattr. If you have any comments, questions or feedback please get in touch via our blog or support page.
(to be continued- as I find more stuff I will keep it there, some ideas- database access from R, prominent R consultants, prominent R packages, famous R interviewees 😉 )
ps- The quote from Jerry Rubin seems funny for a while. I turn 34 this year.
Here is an important new step in Python- the established statistical programming language (used to be really pushed by SPSS in pre-IBM days and the rPy package integrates R and Python).
Well the news ( http://www.kdnuggets.com/2010/10/eap-evolutionary-algorithms-in-python.html ) is the release of Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms in Python. If your understanding of modeling means running regression and iterating it- you may need to read some more. If you have felt frustrated at lack of parallelization in statistical software as well as your own hardware constraints- well go DEAP (and for corporate types the licensing is
DEAP is intended to be an easy to use distributed evolutionary algorithm library in the Python language. Its two main components are modular and can be used separately. The first module is a Distributed Task Manager (DTM), which is intended to run on cluster of computers. The second part is the Evolutionary Algorithms in Python (EAP) framework.
The most basic features of EAP requires Python2.5 (we simply do not offer support for 2.4). In order to use multiprocessing you will need Python2.6 and to be able to combine the toolbox and the multiprocessing module Python2.7 is needed for its support to pickle partial functions.
If you want your project listed here, simply send us a link and a brief description and we’ll be glad to add it.
and from the wordpress.com blog (funny how people like code.google.com but not blogger.google.com anymore) at http://deapdev.wordpress.com/
EAP is part of the DEAP project, that also includes some facilities for the automatic distribution and parallelization of tasks over a cluster of computers. The D part of DEAP, called DTM, is under intense development and currently available as an alpha version. DTM currently provides two and a half ways to distribute workload on a cluster or LAN of workstations, based on MPI and TCP communication managers.
This public release (version 0.6) is more complete and simpler than ever. It includes Genetic Algorithms using any imaginable representation, Genetic Programming with strongly and loosely typed trees in addition to automatically defined functions, Evolution Strategies (including Covariance Matrix Adaptation), multiobjective optimization techniques (NSGA-II and SPEA2), easy parallelization of algorithms and much more like milestones, genealogy, etc.
We are impatient to hear your feedback and comments on that system at .
Best,
François-Michel De Rainville
Félix-Antoine Fortin
Marc-André Gardner
Christian Gagné
Marc Parizeau
Laboratoire de vision et systèmes numériques
Département de génie électrique et génie informatique
Université Laval
Quebec City (Quebec), Canada
and if you are new to Python -sigh here are some statistical things (read ad-van-cED analytics using Python) by a slideshare from Visual numerics (pre Rogue Wave acquisition)
No, this is not about the X Box kind of games. It is about Microsoft ‘s tactical shift in the online space from going it alone, and building stuff itself, –to partnering, and sometimes investing and exiting business.
In Blogs- It recently announced a migration of MS Live Spaces to WordPress.com – It gives Automattic 30 million more users- no small change consider there were 26 million existing WP users.
Microsoft Messenger, which is the oldest online app in the suite, now provides instant messaging services to about 350 million users, and from now on Windows Live Writer works specifically with the WordPress.com blog service by default. Hopefully Skype, and Google Voice will show MS the way to monitize that business app yet.
Google buying blogger-blogspot seems to have done little, but given Biz Stone room to create another content disruption-Twitter.
With the round of lawsuits by proxy, in Android -Motorola, or for acquisitions – MS is just doing what Marc Anderseen (who’s apparently a better VC than Paul Allen was), Sun and co did to it in the nineties.
Google seems to be regretting putting a spade in the Yahoo acquisition- that would have tied up a big chunk of Idle MS cash- leaving it little room for niche investments (like the 250 mill that helped Facebook ramp up in time).
The real surprise here could be Apple- it has shown little interest in cloud computing- and it seems to be testing the waters with Ping. But Apple sure smells competition- and Android is doing to Iphone what Windows did to the Mac in the early 1990’s.
Google lacks presence in online gaming (despite it’s own Zynga investment)- and needs to start monetizing properties like Android OS (say 10$ for every phone license ??), Google Maps (as an app for GPS) and Google Voice. Indeed it may be time for the big G to start thinking of spinning off atleast some products- earning better returns, while retaining control (dual stock splits) and killing those anti trust lawyer fees forever.
As the Ancient Chinese said, May you live in interesting times. Fun to watch the online games people play.
DECISION STATS 
