Some of you may recall that about a year ago the Mozilla Foundation provided a grant to NV Access, an Australia-based nonprofit organization dedicated to developing NVDA, an open source screen reader designed for blind users of Windows applications like Firefox. This grant went to support NV Access hiring a developer (James Teh) to work full-time on NVDA. (The Mozilla Foundation had previously provided a smaller grant as well.) I’m happy to pass on the news that NV Access has now received financial support from Microsoft sufficient to allow Mick Curran (the original developer of NVDA) to also work full-time on NVDA. From my point of view this is a significant development for both NV Access itself, which has taken another step towards sustaining itself and the NVDA project for the long term, and for blind users of Windows. ...

Continuing a tradition from last year, here’s what you can find on eMusic from the list of recommended 2008 recordings published by Alex Ross. (Note that CaptWhiffle also has Alex Ross picks for 2007 and 2008 as a user list on eMusic, something I didn’t notice until I’d almost finished this post.) “Crystal Tears”: songs of Dowland, Robert Johnson, Byrd, and others; Andreas Scholl, countertenor, Julian Behr, lute and Concerto di viole (Harmonia Mundi). This is 21 tracks (about half of my monthly allotment), but I like early music and the samples sound good, so this is a likely download for me. ...

A departure from my usual topics, in remembrance of my college math classes (and with a nod to Mozilla folks working on related areas like automated testing and software verification): Via Eric Drexler via Emergent Chaos comes this interesting review paper on formal proofs in mathematics and software to verify them. As a dual math/physics major I was well acquainted with jokes about the lack of mathematical rigor on the part of physicists, who often engaged in rather slapdash simplifications in their drive to get formulas they could use to explain experimental data and make further predictions. However physicists who cut corners are ultimately saved by the fact that nature will check their work and let them know if they’ve made bonehead mistakes. ...

On the eMusic message boards I just saw a post from rednano74 about Amazon offering “50 albums for $5”. Silly me, I thought this meant for $5 I could buy 50 albums, or $0.10 an album. This of course was just a fever dream; Amazon is simply continuing its standard practice of discounting selected MP3 albums from $9.99 to $5 or less. It’s interesting though: I looked through these 50 albums and didn’t see anything that was attractive to me at a $5 price point. This seems to be my general experience with Amazon’s discounted albums. (I subscribe to the @AmazonMP3 Twitter feed, so I see pretty much everything that appears.) When offered an essentially random collection of discounted albums, a $5, $3, or even $2 price is typically not sufficient to motivate me to purchase something I’m not already seeking out; only at the $0.99 per album level do I tend to make an impulse purchase from Amazon. ...

(In the spirit of Twitter, I’ll keep this post brief.) eMusic folks are now twittering as @17dots (but folks, register @emusic too before it’s taken) @17dots following more (94) than follow it (61), should promote on the message boards Suggest @17dots do 1-3 posts per day, highlight new arrivals, always include links @17dots “competition”: @amazonmp3 daily deals, 6,849 followers (OK but drop in bucket, Twitter over-hyped?)

(This is part 2 of a two-part post; for background on the Gini coefficient see part 1.) I previously discussed use of the Gini coefficient as a way to measure income inequality (or equality, as the case may be), and promised to discuss why Howard County is noteworthy in this regard. In brief, Howard County is one of only seven counties in the US (out of 800 counties and other geographic areas) that rank in the top 5% (positions 1-40) for both median household income and income equality (as measured by the Gini coefficient): ...

(This is part 1 of a two-part post; for the conclusion see part 2.) In a previous post I discussed the concept of median income and how it avoids certain distortions inherent in mean (average) income. However median income by itself is not adequate to characterize the economic status of households in Howard County (or anywhere else for that matter). In particular, the median income just provides the “midpoint” for income, i.e., the income value for which 50% of the households make more and 50% make less; it does not address the question of how income is actually distributed among the various households. ...

This doesn’t sound good: While researching a Howard County-related blog post today I happened to follow a Google search to www.columbia-md.com (a domain controlled by General Growth Partners), and got the following message: “This Account Is No Longer Active.” I guess when your stock’s in the toilet and you’re flirting with bankruptcy you’ve got more pressing things to worry about than keeping your web sites up.

I happened to get an eMusic email a few days ago (announcing new releases in the alternative/punk category) and noticed a link to a “special offer for AT&T Mobile subscribers,” with the promise that “You could win 6 months of free AT&T mobile service.” I recently became an AT&T subscriber (when I bought an iPhone), so this sounded intriguing and I clicked on the link. It turned out to be a sweepstakes tied to a trial offer for eMusic Mobile, and isn’t even applicable to me because eMusic Mobile doesn’t work with iPhones. ...

In a previous post I investigated the question of whether those in Howard County with annual incomes of $120,000 or more truly constituted the “wealthy few” or not. (The answer: No.) Key to that investigation was the idea of median household income, as reported by the US Census Bureau in its annual Amercian Community Survey. It turns out that the ACS data provide some interesting insights into what makes Howard County special, and can help explain the nature of the conflicts that have raged over the future of Howard County in general and Columbia in particular. ...