Monthly Archives: April 2008

The limits of AdSense intelligence

A few days ago, I created a post including an abstract of Murat Iyigun’s new paper on the role the Ottoman empire might have inadvertently played in the eventual success of European Protestantism. Since then, ads for ottomans started popping … Continue reading

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WordPress 2.5: a minor disappointment

After running WordPress 2.5 for a week or so, I switched back to WordPress 2.3.3. Reasons? Here are a few… WordPress 2.5 ate my plugins… Well, not all of them, of course, but one that was nicely integrated into the … Continue reading

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PHP as FastCGI on Windows

Apparently, Microsoft has a video on the subject: (Click here to view full-size video in a new window) Also, there is a fairly detailed tutorial about it on IIS.Net…

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Murat Iyigun on Luther and Suleyman

Murat Iyigun has an interesting paper forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics: Luther and Suleyman Abstract Various historical accounts have suggested that the Ottomans’ rise helped the Protestant Reform movement as well as its offshoots, such as Zwinglianism, Anabaptism, … Continue reading

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Communication between ASP.Net and PHP

A question from comp.lang.php: I want to create a process on asp.net that, by interaction on a .aspx page a process is fired off that creates and sends a file via https: to a URL which is a php page. … Continue reading

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Larry Bartels on partisan differences

Larry Bartels, the author of Unequal Democracy, guest-blogs on Dani Rodrik’s site: * * * * * Professor Rodrik has kindly invited me to respond to some of the questions and comments generated by his recent post describing my analysis … Continue reading

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The risk premium hypothesis

Karl Smith writes: A striking empirical regularity is emerging. The US economy experiences better growth and less inequality under Democratic presidents. Like Paul Krugman I have typically dismissed this as a likely statistical aberration because I could not think of … Continue reading

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Would you invest in your projects?

In a previous post, I mused on the relationship (or, rather, lack thereof) between project management and innovation. Apparently, the person I was responding to has a blog chock-full of well-meaning, but often misguided, posts. Here’s the latest so far: … Continue reading

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Innovation and project management

A (non-)question from Askville: Innovation is one of those buzz words that evokes positive emotions. It is generally considered a “good” thing, and therefore is something that we want to do. However, there are other things to consider so, lets … Continue reading

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Array constant in PHP

A question asked privately: Can I define an array constant in PHP? No (see documentation), but there is a workaround you can use. You can serialize() an array and store the resulting string in a constant. When you need to … Continue reading

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