Four short links: 14 March 2011

Future Retrospective, Political Entrepreneurs, Library DRM, and In-Database Analytics

by | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 14, 2011
  1. A History of the Future in 100 Objects (Kickstarter) — blog+podcast+video+book project, to have future historians tell the story of our century in 100 objects. The BBC show that inspired it was brilliant, and I rather suspect this will be too. It’s a clever way to tell a story of the future (his hardest problem will be creating a single coherent narrative for the 21st century). What are the 100 objects that future historians will use to sum up our century? ‘Smart drugs’ that change the way we think? A fragment from suitcase nuke detonated in Shanghai? A wedding ring between a human and an AI? The world’s most expensive glass of water, returned from a private mission to an asteroid? (via RIG London weekly notes)
  2. Entrepreneurs Who Create Value vs Entrepreneurs Who Lock Up Value (Andy Kessler) — distinguishes between “political entrepreneurs” who leverage their political power to own something and then overcharge or tax the crap out of the rest of us to use it vs “market entrepreneurs” who recognize the price-to-value gap and jump in. Ignoring legislation, they innovate, disintermediate, compete, stay up all night coding, and offer something better and cheaper until the market starts to shift. My attention was particularly caught by for every stroke of the pen, for every piece of legislation, for every paid-off congressman, there now exists a price umbrella that overvalues what he or any political entrepreneur is doing. (via Bryce Roberts)
  3. Harper-Collins Caps eBook Loans — The publisher wants to sell libraries DRMed ebooks that will self-destruct after 26 loans. Public libraries have always served and continue to serve those people who can’t access information on the purchase market. Jackass moves like these prevent libraries from serving those people in the future that we hope will come soon: the future where digital is default and print is premium. That premium may well be “the tentacles of soulless bottom-dwelling coprocephalic publishers can’t digitally destroy your purchase”. It’s worth noting that O’Reilly offers DRM-free PDFs of the books they publish, including mine. Own what you buy lest it own you. (via BoingBoing and many astonished library sources)
  4. MAD Lib — BSD-licensed open-source library for scalable in-database analytics. It provides data-parallel implementations of mathematical, statistical and machine learning methods for structured and unstructured data. (via Ted Leung)
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