What do you look for first in a theme?

First and foremost, I look for a theme that I think looks good and fits stylistically with the site I’m creating. The first few seconds of a new visit is where you either convince a user to stay or scare them off. I never want the appearance of my sites to drive away potential customers – because it will (case in point: Fabric Land).

You’ve got to remember that WordPress isn’t anything more than a vehicle to drive your vision home to your customers, readers, fans, or market. It’s a great bit of software – and like all software, what you intend to get out of it is as important as how you use it.

I also keep my wordpress installs up to date, and I test themes and plugins in a sandbox to make sure everything plays together well. This may be easier for me than some other folks, since I’m technically savvy, and have wordpress servers out the ying yang. I also have a full blown wordpress test environment on my computer, so I can try out new themes, plugins, settings, page templates, etc in the privacy of my own system. When I get things the way I want, I upload. Obviously, this is something that you want to outsource if you’re not doing wordpress development.

Some additional questions were:

Some themes make certain plugins obsolete. So which combination are you using?

I try to use the smallest number of plugins I can on each site, but here are some that I almost always include: Akismet, WPTouch iPhone Theme plugin, WP-SpamFree, Google XML Sitemap, All in One SEO Pack, Sociable, Twitme, Adsense Deluxe

The key is to only add plugins if they add to the business value of the site you’re building.

Some themes seem to have too many options and others not enough. I don’t want to have a theme with too many or it may slow the site down. What is a good balance?

This is a bit subjective – you need to know what you’re trying to get done on your site and then you look to see if the theme or a combination of theme + plugins gets you where you need to be. When in doubt – make a list of Must Have features, Like to Have features, and Can Live Without features for your site. At a minimum I make sure the Must Haves are in my site plan – and consider everything else gravy.

I want a theme that allows me to have a description of my site and services at the top and a list of posts below. Is that better to do it with a plugin or a theme?

Again – it depends. If you go with a premium theme like Woo Themes or Elegant Themes, then you’ll typically have more functionality in the theme itself – since they often bundle plugins with their themes. You’re always going to have a mix – right? You WILL have a theme, and there WILL be plugins. You need to find the right mix for you – or be able to describe what you need in sufficient detail that your guy in the Philippines can build it for you.

Can I change the header image easily?

Almost always, yes. Also, almost always, your mileage will vary. Many themes have options or instructions on how to change the header. It’s also not too difficult for a junior developer to change the HTML, CSS or PHP in your theme to make it exactly how you want it to appear.

How do I know how stable a theme is? Does it work consistently on all browsers?

Look for popular free themes for both stability and browser compatibility. Many premium themes need to be both stable and browser friendly, or they won’t sell. The bottom line here is to test, test, test!

Can I start out with a free theme until the business is bringing in income?

Absolutely. Most free themes also allow you to modify them under the GPL, so you can change this part or that to make it look the way you want.

There are lots and lots of great themes out there. I like the style of many of the themes on the smashing magazine list.
I’m even using a custom version of the Dilectio theme right here on my blog and twitter page.

According to the Federation of American Sciences website, the American Association for the Advancement of Science is holding a meeting about the possibility of reinstating the OTA.

The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment provided rigorous, bipartisan, scientific and technological advice to Congress for nearly two decades before being eliminated in 1995. This session will focus on how to effectively place scientific and technical information into a policy context, analyze it, and communicate it to policy makers and the public.

It’s about damn time.

Do you want Congress to keep making decisions about evolution, climate change, stem cell research, alternate energy programs – or any other scientific area without a fair and impartial assessment of the scientific issues involved? If so, then you deserve whatever crap happens to you as a result of your majestic and profound idiocy.

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

The point that Anderson is trying to make is that now that we have such an overabundance of data, we don’t really need science anymore. We don’t need to worry why things happen, only that they do happen, and that’s good enough.

The problem with this sort of thinking isn’t just that it mistakes correlation with causation, but that it elevates the role of data in our thinking about natural phenomena to an undeserved level. As I mentioned before, scientific reasoning begins with data – it doesn’t end with it. In Anderson’s world, there’s some level of data at which we can stop asking why. He claims that the more we learn (that is – the more data we have) the farther we are from having good theoretical models that account for the facts.

That’s an interesting position, but it’s wrong. Even in the cases he uses, such as theoretical physics, the volume of data isn’t what threatens our mental models – nor does it need to fundamentally alter how we go about creating those models. As he correctly points out – data without a model is just noise. To go from that truth to a conclusion that boundless vistas of disconnected data are somehow more than noise is quite a conceptual leap.

More data doesn’t change – and certainly doesn’t obsolete – good scientific reasoning from facts toward organizing principles that account for those facts. Instead, new mountain ranges of data provide the possibility of new discoveries and challenges to existing theoretical structures that simply cannot explain them. We’re not facing some data-driven obsolescence of the scientific method.

Instead, we’re probably looking at an acceleration of it.

In this video, Pablos Holman, a futurist and hacker shows how simple it is to steal RFID-enabled credit card information using an RFID reader he bought for about $8. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags are very hot right now as they allow companies to streamline their inventory systems. They’re also showing up in smart card applications – but – as in this case – without sufficient security – anyone with an RFID reader could grab your credit card info. Just by walking past you on a busy street.

I love spooky tech.

That may be so, but roughly half of the comment on the gizmodo report looked forward to its application in the porn industry. I’m sure that never occurred to the system’s developers at Stanford.