Links for Sunday, March 15, 2009

• Karl Denninger: Reserve Banking – “As the “spread” between production and net interest expense rises, the economy falters. A higher and higher percentage of the loans ultimately cannot be paid back, even productive loans, because the net interest expense over time exceeds the productive gain of the person who takes them out. The presence of this ever-widening spread, which is inherently part and parcel of fractional reserve banking, means that recessions are necessary and more importantly, some people who have taken out loans and some people who made loans must, during those recessions, go bankrupt.“
• Phil Windley: Continuous Deployment – “*You may not be able to get to 50 deployments a day overnight, but you can increase the frequency of deployment and prioritize the development efforts necessary to increase that frequency. Set some goals and take your life back. *“
• Caleb Booker: How Backchat Makes Your Presentation A Killer – “Every event we’ve ever run has had backchat built right in: the speaker in the virtual world uses the voice channel, and the audience uses the built-in local text chat from the same environment. We’ve even experimented with fielding questions from the audience this way, although on that end we find people tend to want a private aside with the moderator instead of asking publicly.“
• Tamar Weinberg: How to Present While People are Twittering – “Yes, presenting with the back-channel is challenging. Prepare yourself for what it will be like. We’re used to having eye contact with our audience and using that eye contact and audience reaction to measure how well we’re engaging the audience. Now when you say something brilliant, instead of nods of appreciation, there will be a flurry of tapping.“