Four short links: 5 July 2013

Tracking Bitcoin, Gaming Deflation, Bloat-Aware Design, and Mapping Entity Relationships

  1. Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph (PDF) — We analyzed all these large transactions by following in detail the way these sums were accumulated and the way they were dispersed, and realized that almost all these large transactions were descendants of a single transaction which was carried out in November 2010. Finally, we noted that the subgraph which contains these large transactions along with their neighborhood has many strange looking structures which could be an attempt to conceal the existence and relationship between these transactions, but such an attempt can be foiled by following the money trail in a succinctly persistent way. (via Alex Dong)
  2. Majority of Gamers Today Can’t Finish Level 1 of Super Mario Bros — Nintendo test, and the President of Nintendo said in a talk, We watched the replay videos of how the gamers performed and saw that many did not understand simple concepts like bottomless pits. Around 70 percent died to the first Goomba. Another 50 percent died twice. Many thought the coins were enemies and tried to avoid them. Also, most of them did not use the run button. There were many other depressing things we noted but I can not remember them at the moment. (via Beta Knowledge)
  3. Bloat-Aware Design for Big Data Applications (PDF) — (1) merging and organizing related small data record objects into few large objects (e.g., byte buffers) instead of representing them explicitly as one-object-per-record, and (2) manipulating data by directly accessing buffers (e.g., at the byte chunk level as opposed to the object level). The central goal of this design paradigm is to bound the number of objects in the application, instead of making it grow proportionally with the cardinality of the input data. (via Ben Lorica)
  4. Poderopedia (Github) — originally designed for investigative journalists, the open src software allows you to create and manage entity profile pages that include: short bio or summary, sheet of connections, long newsworthy profiles, maps of connections of an entity, documents related to the entity, sources of all the information and news river with external news about the entity. See the announcement and website.
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