- Cooperative Behaviour Spreads Through a Group, But So Does Cheating (Not Exactly Rocket Science) — Fowler and Christakis suggest that people tend to mimic the actions of those they played with. They could be directly imitating the actions of other players, or they could be looking out for cues that tell them the ‘right’ or ‘normal’ way of behaving. Whether it’s specific actions or social norms that are spreading, the result is the same – a ripple effect that causes groups of people to act in similar ways. People copy the modeled behaviour that they see. This is why, when you start a new social site, you should seed it with people who behave the way that you wish newcomers to behave.
- Tulip — open source 3D visualisation software of large graphs, homepage here. (via hjl on Delicious)
- Six Months of Hacker News Front Page Data — half a million archived records from the Hacker News front page, captured every 15m.
- Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention (World Changing) — a very thought-provoking post that challenges the idea that all we need to do to help the citizens of (insert censored country here) is to have more people using Tor. I wonder whether we’re looking closely enough at the fundamental limitations of circumvention as a strategy and asking ourselves what we’re hoping internet freedom will do for users in closed societies. […] o figure out how to promote internet freedom, I believe we need to start addressing the question: “How do we think the Internet changes closed societies?” In other words, do we have a “theory of change” behind our desire to ensure people in Iran, Burma, China, etc. can access the internet? Why do we believe this is a priority for the State Department or for public diplomacy as a whole? (via BoingBoing)
"3D" entries
Four short links: 9 March 2010
Cooperation is Catching, 3D Visualisation Tool, News Dump, and Fighting Censorship
Four short links: 27 November 2009
3D Models from Webcams, a Javascript Scheme, EMACS in Your Browser, and CS History
- ProFORMA — software which builds a 3D model as you rotate an object in front of your webcam. Check out the video below. (via Wired)
- BiwaScheme — a Scheme interpreter written in Javascript. (via Hacker News)
- YMacs — in-browser EMACS written in Javascript. Emacs, for those of you who were left in any doubt, is the only editor ever created by software engineers worth a damn (where “worth a damn” == “has possibly already achieved sentience”) with the possible exception of teco.
- Historic Documents in Computer Science — my eye was caught by John Backus’s first FORTRAN manual, Niklaus Wirth’s original Pascal paper, the BCPL reference manual (the C programming language got its name from the C in BCPL), and Eckert and Mauchly’s ENIAC patent. (via Hacker News)
3D Glasses: Virtual Reality, Meet the iPhone
A light flickers from two distinct points in time. As a child in the early-1970s, one of my toys was a View-Master, a binoculars-like device for viewing 3D images (called stereograms), essentially a mini-program excerpted from popular destinations, TV shows, cartoons, events and the like. Flash forward to the present, and we are suddenly on the cusp of a game-changing event; one that I believe kicks the door open for 3D and VR apps to become mainstream. I am talking about the release of iPhone OS version 3.0.
The desktop 3D printer
Yesterday, Andrew Sheppard pointed me at a desktop 3D printer for under $5000. That brought back some memories… In the early 80s, I worked for Imagen, the company that made the first laser printer that sold for under $20,000, the first laser printer that sold for under $10,000, and the first laser printer that sold for under $7,000. We didn't…