Luckily, there is a growing movement within the scientific establishment to better measure and reward all the different ways that people contribute to the messy and complex process of scientific progress. This movement has begun to gather loosely around the banner of "altmetrics," which was born out of a simple recognition: Many of the traditional measurements are too slow or simplistic to keep pace with today's internet-age science.
—Samuel Arbesman, "New Ways to Measure Science," Wired Science, January 9, 2012

But the fact the damage would be lighter makes such a Grexit more likely. And with Greece currently struggling to secure reform pledges from its public sector and its wider population, the willingness of overseas creditors to help has diminished somewhat.
—"Greek impasse raise fears of 'Grexit'," The Guardian, February 7, 2012

If you saw the Super Bowl halftime show, you probably wondered, "Who's that guy in a toga bouncing crazily on a rope next to Madonna? And how's he doing it?" The guy was Andy Lewis, a slacklining champion from California, and he did it after many, many years of practice. Slacklining is different from tightrope walking. Instead of a taught [sic] line, it's performed on inch-thick nylon webbing that stretches and bounces.
—Marc Silver, "After the Super Bowl, Everyone's Curious About Slacklining," National Geographic News Watch, February 8, 2012

Intrigued, I set out to discover what happened to the cyberflâneur. While I quickly found other contemporaneous commentators who believed that flânerie would flourish online, the sad state of today's Internet suggests that they couldn't have been more wrong. Cyberflâneurs are few and far between, while the very practice of cyberflânerie seems at odds with the world of social media.
—Evgeny Morozov, "The Death of the Cyberflâneur," The New York Times, February 4, 2012

It's not a trivial problem, according to his study of stress levels in 100 smartphone users, including university students, retail workers and public-sector employees. Some users in the study were so hooked that they reported feeling "phantom vibrations" from non-existent text messages.
—Adriana Barton, "Smartphone stress: Can you say irony?," The Globe and Mail, January 22, 2012

The key difference between the two dimensional QR code and the single dimensional barcode is the amount of data they contain. Quick Response codes are also known as hardlinks or physical world hyperlinks. QR Codes store up to 4,296 alphanumeric characters of arbitrary text. This text can be anything, for example, a URL, contact information, a telephone number, even a blog post!
—Bob Leah, "Create a Quick Response Code (QR Code) image using Google Chart," IBM developerWorks, March 14, 2011

The FSB list of 29 banks, known as "SIFIs," includes those judged to be the most globally important to the financial system by their size and complexity. The measures were agreed on by regulators to prevent any "systemically important financial institution" from failing and roiling the global economy.
—"Global regulators to subject 29 banks to stricter regulations," The Washington Post, November 4, 2011

A "physible" is a digital plan for an object that can either be designed on a computer or uploaded with a 3D scanner. Those plans can be downloaded and used to assemble real, tangible objects using a 3D printer. Printers are getting more affordable, but they're still limited by the kinds of materials they can use.
—Jon Mitchell, "Forget MP3s: Soon You'll Download Your Sneakers From The Pirate Bay," ReadWriteWeb, January 24, 2012

Craig Estep...says that the root of the CitationJet problem was "engineering would design the airplane and throw it over the wall to manufacturing who would take what they got" and move on to production—a classic failure.
—Philip Siekman, "Cessna Tackles Lean Manufacturing," Fortune, May 1, 2000

Here's a cautionary tale for the corporate social media consultants of the world. Last week, McDonald's launched a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #McDStories; it was hoping that the hashtag would inspire heart-warming stories about Happy Meals. Instead, it attracted snarky tweeps and McDonald's detractors who turned it into a #bashtag to share their #McDHorrorStories.
—Kashmir Hill, "#McDStories: When A Hashtag Becomes A Bashtag," Forbes, January 24, 2012

Steve Inch, chair of the Scotcash board, said the collaboration — which sees a loan advisor based full time in the offices of North Glasgow Housing Association, also helped avoid the phenomenon of "zombie" loan accounts.

"There's a new term being coined for payday borrowers who are able only to pay the interest on their loans — zombie debtors — so that the principal debt just rolls on, and while there's talk of those institutions having a code of conduct introduced, that's only in the pipeline at present and we want people to know that there is an alternative in the shape of Scotcash," he said.
—Joan McFadden, "Loan service launches attack on the zombies," Herald Scotland, December 30, 2011

Nobody wants to speak too soon, but the horrors of the past 12 months seem far away. Nothing has changed, of course. All the old nasties are still there, including looming Eurogeddon, but we're told that every possible hazard has been "priced in".
—Jeremy Thomas, "US investors busy making other plans," Business LIVE, January 21, 2012