- The Million Follower Fallacy (PDF) — We found that indegree represents a user’s popularity, but is not related to other important notions of influence such as engaging audience, i.e., retweets and mentions. Retweets are driven by the content value of a tweet, while mentions are driven by the name value of the user. Such subtle differences lead to dissimilar groups of the top Twitter users; users who have high indegree do not necessarily spawn many retweets or mentions. This finding suggests that indegree alone reveals very little about the influence of a user. Research confirms what we all knew, that idiots who chase follower numbers have the influence they deserve. (via Steve O’Grady on Twitter, indirectly)
- Geocoding Github: Visualizing Distributed Open-Source Development — work for the Stanford visualization class, plotting open source commits on maps over time. See this page for the interactive explorer. (via Michael Driscoll on Twitter)
- ArduPilotMega 1.0 Launched — autopilot built on the Arduino platform. (via Chris Anderson on Twitter)
- Lessons of the Gawker Security Mess (Forbes blog) — nice deconstruction of what happened. In the chat, Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, after hearing that it is just Gawker users who have been compromised, remarks “oh, well. unimportant”. Gawker’s Richard Lawson wants to know if the breach is limited to “just the peasants?” Don’t trash talk about your users in company channels. The business that forgets it lives and dies on its customers is a business that will eventually be hated by its customers. (via Nahum Wild on Twitter)
"arduino" entries
Google I/O 2011: 5 things to keep watching
From Chromebooks to Arduino to bots: Mike Loukides examines I/O's big themes.
Google I/O 2011 was marked by the Android Accessory Development Kit, the Chromebook vision and lots of robots. Mike Loukides examines the big I/O developments and their possible repercussions.
The secret is to bang the rocks together
Arduino is a building block for the world to come.
Every so often a piece of technology can become a lever that lets people move the world, just a little bit. The Arduino is one of those levers.
Four short links: 14 December 2010
Twitter Influence, Open Source Visualized, Arduino Autopilot, and Customer Respect
Four short links: 4 October 2010
Electronic Health Records, LilyPad Appeal, Time Management, and Locking Library
- Two Brothers Await Broad Use of Medical E-Records (New York Times) — The Doerrs’ software company is only one of many hoping to cash in on the national mandate for digital medical records. The companies range from giants like General Electric to specialists like Athenahealth that cater to small physician practices. They, like the Doerrs, are betting that the law will help create a turning point for the economics of digital health records, opening the door to rapid adoption by doctors and a thriving business at last. NZ-based Orion Health is expanding at a great rate in the US, doing electronic health records. The tide is beginning to turn away from paper, thank goodness. (via DrChrisPaton on Twitter)
- On Feminism and Microcontrollers (Benjamin Mako Hill) — We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino).
- Pomodoro Technique — time management system. (via auchmill on Twitter)
- Lock-free Data Structure Library in C — free library offering list, queue, ringbuffer, stack, ….
Four short links: 4 August 2010
Python Reasoning, Learning the Right Way, Curated Folksonomy, Arduino Image Correction
- FuXi — Python-based, bi-directional logical reasoning system for the semantic web from the folks at the Open Knowledge Foundation. (via About Inferencing)
- Harness the Power of Being an Idiot — I learn by trying to build something, there’s no other way I can discover the devils-in-the-details. Unfortunately that’s an incredibly inefficient way to gain knowledge. I basically wander around stepping on every rake in the grass, while the A Students memorize someone else’s route and carefully pick their way across the lawn without incident. My only saving graces are that every now and again I discover a better path, and faced with a completely new lawn I have an instinct for where the rakes are.
- Stack Overflow’s Curated Folksonomy — community-driven tag synonym system to reduce the chaos of different names for the same thing. (via Skud)
- Image Deblurring using Inertial Measurement Sensors (Microsoft Research) — using Arduino to correct motion blur. (via Jon Oxer)
Hardware hacking heaven
OSCON's hardware track looks at ways to hack the world around you.
Hacking isn't just for software anymore. A full range of open source hardware hacks — everything from Arduino to parallel programming to small-form computing — will be discussed at OSCON this year. With the current slate of tools, it's never been easier to write code that runs on low-power, small-format devices. And many of these tools are familiar to conventional software developers.
Four short links: 4 June 2010
Arduino Home, DIY Lightning with Water and Gravity, Graph Visualization, and Neglected Diseases
- HomeSense — an open user-centered research project investigating the use of smart and networked technologies in the home, with uber-Arduino-rockstar Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. (via titine on Twitter)
- Kelvin’s Thunderstorm (Instructables) — “create lightning from water and gravity”. Simple and impressive science. (via Paul Fenwick)
- Graph Visualization Code in Javascript (Stack Overflow) — good pointers to interesting libraries.
- ChEMBL – Neglected Tropical Disease archive — a repository for Open Access primary screening and medicinal chemistry data directed at neglected diseases. CC0-licensed datasets identifying several tens of thousands of compounds active against the malarial parasite P. falciparum in an effort to lower the cost of drug creation for this neglected disease. (via Common Knowledge blog)