Four short links: 13 August 2009

  1. Under the Hood of App Inventor for Android — regular readers know I’m a big fan of visual programming language Scratch, and apparently Google are too. They’ve got twelve university classes testing App Inventor for Android, a visual connect-the-bits programming environment for Android. University classes probably because one of the co-creators is Hal Abelson, coauthor of the definitive programming textbook. Also found online: the PR-type announcement, a Professor using it, and @AppInv (nothing juicy on Twitter–it looks like might be a channel for tech support for the students). (via Hacker News)
  2. Google Web Optimizer Case Study (Four Hour Work Week) — GWO manages A/B tests for you, with a lot of statistical analysis. It’s a fascinating read to see how these should be done. Every equation may halve the readership of a book, but every table of numbers and relevancy analysis doubles the value of a post like this. (via Hacker News)
  3. Opening Up The BBC’s Natural History Archive — the BBC are releasing programme segments and a whole lot of metadata around their programming. Audio and video segmented, tagged with DBpedia terms, and aggregated into a URI structure based on natural history concepts: species, habitats, adaptations, etc. Gorgeous!
  4. Yahoo! Term Extraction API to CloseInternally, both services
    share a backend data source that is closing down, so the publicly-facing YDN
    services will be closing as well.
    I think it’s the most significant casualty of Y! outsourcing search to MSFT, as this API was used by a lot of projects. (via Simon Willison)
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