Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media La. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

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In his blog post commenting on risk-adjusted bonuses, Dominic Connor has this to say on caliber of some bank's board members:

A clear factor in the recent calamities has been the lack of expertise at the very top levels of banks. Reviewing the publicly available lists of board members at many firms, I observe that most of them not only have never taken an active role in trading, analysis or risk management, but that today few would even be accepted as a trainee in a less prestigious organisation than they ran into the ground. In effect we had mediocre cavalry officers in charge of nuclear bombers.

Image by tiarescott

I miss the days when it's easy to tell apart spam comments. Gone are the day of good old body part enlarger. Lately, about a third of comment spams look so real that I can't fault Mollom for not catching them. If not for the links to ad farms, there would be no way to tell these are indeed spam.

Take for example this comment made on a page about K2 theme for Drupal.

Thanks for the theme, still trying to learn drupal

How much more relevant can you get? Even if this doesn't add anything to the conversation or offer any insights, it is very much on-topic. But the link points to a commercial site.

How do they do this? Paying human to skim a post and write somewhat relevant comment with spam link? Or are the spammers using the same trick they used to circumvent CAPTCHAs?

It’s too bad he couldn’t reclaim the championship, but this year’s is as good contests go. (eating contests, anyway)

Kobayahi and Chestnut tied at 59 hot dogs and buns at regular time (10 minutes) and Chestnut beat him to the crown in the 5 dogs extra time show down.

Photo by dietrich on Flickr.