"BERG London" entries

Four short links: 29 October 2013

Four short links: 29 October 2013

Digital Citizenship, Berg Cloud, Data Warehouse, and The Spying Iron

  1. Mozilla Web Literacy Standard — things you should be able to do if you’re to be trusted to be on the web unsupervised. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Berg Cloud Platform — hardware (shield), local network, and cloud glue. Caution: magic ahead!
  3. Sharka large-scale data warehouse system for Spark designed to be compatible with Apache Hive. It can execute Hive QL queries up to 100 times faster than Hive without any modification to the existing data or queries. Shark supports Hive’s query language, metastore, serialization formats, and user-defined functions, providing seamless integration with existing Hive deployments and a familiar, more powerful option for new ones. (via Strata)
  4. The Malware of Thingsa technician opening up an iron included in a batch of Chinese imports to find a “spy chip” with what he called “a little microphone”. Its correspondent said the hidden devices were mostly being used to spread viruses, by connecting to any computer within a 200m (656ft) radius which were using unprotected Wi-Fi networks.
Four short links: 13 May 2013

Four short links: 13 May 2013

Exploiting Glass, Teaching Probability, Product Design, and Subgraph Matching

  1. Exploiting a Bug in Google Glass — unbelievably detailed and yet easy-to-follow explanation of how the bug works, how the author found it, and how you can exploit it too. The second guide was slightly more technical, so when he returned a little later I asked him about the Debug Mode option. The reaction was interesting: he kind of looked at me, somewhat confused, and asked “wait, what version of the software does it report in Settings”? When I told him “XE4” he clarified “XE4, not XE3”, which I verified. He had thought this feature had been removed from the production units.
  2. Probability Through Problems — motivating problems to hook students on probability questions, structured to cover high-school probability material.
  3. Connbox — love the section “The importance of legible products” where the physical UI interacts seamless with the digital device … it’s glorious. Three amazing videos.
  4. The Index-Based Subgraph Matching Algorithm (ISMA): Fast Subgraph Enumeration in Large Networks Using Optimized Search Trees (PLoSONE) — The central question in all these fields is to understand behavior at the level of the whole system from the topology of interactions between its individual constituents. In this respect, the existence of network motifs, small subgraph patterns which occur more often in a network than expected by chance, has turned out to be one of the defining properties of real-world complex networks, in particular biological networks. […] An implementation of ISMA in Java is freely available.
Four short links: 2 August 2012

Four short links: 2 August 2012

Creative Business, News Design, Google Earth Glitches, and Data Distortion

  1. Patton Oswalt’s Letters to Both SidesYou guys need to stop thinking like gatekeepers. You need to do it for the sake of your own survival. Because all of us comedians after watching Louis CK revolutionize sitcoms and comedy recordings and live tours. And listening to “WTF With Marc Maron” and “Comedy Bang! Bang!” and watching the growth of the UCB Theatre on two coasts and seeing careers being made on Twitter and Youtube. Our careers don’t hinge on somebody in a plush office deciding to aim a little luck in our direction. (via Jim Stogdill)
  2. Headliner — interesting Guardian experiment with headlines and presentation. As always, reading the BERG designers’ notes are just as interesting as the product itself. E.g., how they used computer vision to find faces and zoom in on them to make articles more attractive to browsing readers.
  3. Google Earth Glitches — where 3d maps and aerial imagery don’t match up. (via Beta Knowledge)
  4. Campbell’s LawThe more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. (via New York Times)
Four short links: 28 September 2011

Four short links: 28 September 2011

Future Tech, Book Lawsuits, Site Design, and Sundae Problems

  1. Russell Davies: Four Thought (audio) — some very nice thinking on the future of technology.
  2. The Fight Over the Future of Digital Books (The Atlantic) — Authors Guild v. HathiTrust is a strange legal twist. For an association of professional writers, the Guild seems to have forgotten some of the basic principles of its craft, such as not placing sympathetic figures like librarians in the role of villains. Almost comically, the Guild’s press release trumpeting its lawsuit against HathiTrust augurs a dark day in the not-too-distant future when old works, including obscure Yiddish texts, are “abducted” and “released” to thousands of students and professors.
  3. The Design Behind How Many Really — this is fantastic stuff, showing the evolution of their thinking.
  4. Science Museums are Failing GrownupsI think this is a sundae problem. A sundae is a bowl full of ice cream. You put some stuff on top of it, but it remains, fundamentally, a bowl full of ice cream. And when I talk about examples of really great adult engagement in science museums, I am, generally, talking about the sprinkles, not the ice cream. The museums acknowledge the problem, but they’re dealing with it by adding in a couple of things here and there. A traveling exhibit. One exhibit out of the whole museum. One night a month. What they really need are serious changes to the bulk of the experience. Sundae problem. I like this.
Four short links: 23 September 2011

Four short links: 23 September 2011

Visualizing Populations, Hardware Futures, Radio Different, and Kooky Javascript

  1. How Many Really? — project by BERG and BBC to help make sense of large numbers of people, in the context of your social network. Clever! (via BERG London)
  2. Why the Best Days of Open Hardware Are Yet To Come (Bunnie Huang) — as Moore’s law decelerates, there is a potential for greater standardization of platforms. A provocative picture of life in a world where Moore’s Law is breaking up. A must-read.
  3. Ira Glass on RadioLab — fascinating analysis of a product that’s the result of skilled creators with high standards and a desire to do things differently. Lessons for all who would be different. (via Courtney Johnston)
  4. Scripting Photoshop with Javascript — Javascript is the new BASIC. (via Brett Taylor)
Four short links: 31 August 2011

Four short links: 31 August 2011

Maps on Android, Security Laws, Trough of Potential, and Enterprise Gamification

  1. OSMdroidThe OpenStreetMapView is a (almost) full/free replacement for Android’s MapView class. Also see this tutorial. (via Simon Gianoutsos)
  2. 10 Immutable Laws of Security (Microsoft) — an oldie but a goodie. Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore.
  3. What’s in The Trough? (BERG London) — as a predictor or similar tool for action, the Gartner Hype Cycle is comically useless. As a tool for brainstorming, as BERG point out, it’s fantastic.
  4. JP Rangaswami’s Enterprise Gamification (Livestream) — video of JP’s “Enterprise Gamification” talk. As Kevin Slavin points out, the introduction is cheesily bad but the talk is pantswettingly good.