Fri

Jun 5
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 5 June 2009

Kid Robots, US CTO, SCOTUS CSS, Javascript Infoviz

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

  1. Visual Programming Environments for Kids -- detailed writeup of the research and coding done by Shone Sadler to build a visual programming environment for robots, so simple that kids can use it. (via steveweiss on Twitter)
  2. The Nation's CTO Lays Out His Priorities -- it's still not entirely clear how the CTO and CIO's roles differ, as both are focusing on open data and "innovation platforms". CTO explicitly calls out economic growth through technology and innovation, though, which could be promising.
  3. Redesigning the Government: The US Supreme Court -- the Sunlight Foundation offer a redesigned home page to the US Supreme Court, showing how it could be more useful. How long until the government's CSS is in a git repository where most people with commit access are outside the beltway?
  4. Javascript Infoviz Toolkit -- Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, and more.in this Javascript suite for building data pretties. Higher-level than processing.js. (via chrisblizzard on Twitter)


tags: design, education, government, javascript, programming, robots, visualization, web | comments: 2
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Comments: 2

Alex Tolley [2009-06-06 07:43 AM]

Re: The Nation's CTO Lays Out His Priorities

This is all starting to sound very familiar, very dirigiste, and not good.

familiar,, because this echoes Britain's Labour government of the 1960's trying to promulgate the "white heat of technology" to stem the problems of a failing economy.

Dirigiste, because government investing in technology means government successfully picking winners. Let's see, does Japan's Fifth Generation computer project sound familiar, or perhaps on a smaller scale, France's Minitel? Governments do not do well in this regard and effectively distort the market.

If we want more R&D, put more government funds into basic research, especially riskier, high payoff ones, change the tax structure to allow more write-offs, especially equipment, and find ways to make it easier for small companies to break into large markets such as a telecoms and keep the damn lobbyists out of government which serves the interests of large companies with vested interests in the status quo.

I am truly surprised that we seem to be revisiting the mistakes of the past.


bowerbird [2009-06-08 12:56 PM]

alex said:
> I am truly surprised that we seem to be
> revisiting the mistakes of the past.

you're in that "tween" stage, alex, don't worry it won't last long,
where you're old enough to know we're repeating past mistakes,
but yet still young enough to be "truly surprised" by that fact...

-bowerbird

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