"book related" entries

Four short links: 28 Jan 2009

Four short links: 28 Jan 2009

Sensors, games, recession indicators, and book prep in today’s four short links:

  1. New Networks Take Nature’s Pulse – an article in Christian Science Monitor about sensor networks. Makezine pointed out that hobbyists are building low-cost versions with Arduinos. Sensor networks are part of the “Web meets World” change we’re in, where the Web ceases to be something you sit down to interact with. Instead, our everyday life will inform and be informed by the Web in ways we won’t realize.
  2. Interactive Fiction Goes to Market – a company, Textfyre is readying new text adventure games (“interactive fiction”) for the iPhone market. I dream of a day when the text adventure world becomes lucrative again (the tools like Inform are divine) but I can’t help think that the iPhone is the wrong platform. The make-believe keyboard makes text entry such a chore that it would seem to count against text adventures. I hope and wish that I am proven wrong and some day the CEO of Textfyre buys the house next to me just so he can build a huge mansion and paint on the walls “Nat Torkington thought the iPhone was the wrong platform for text adventures”.
  3. You Know It’s a Recession When More People Search for Coupons Than Britney Spears – interesting tidbit from Bo Cowgill, who runs Google’s internal prediction market. His blog is full of fascinating pointers to prediction market research. Between him and David Pennock, my prediction market cup runneth over.
  4. How To Write a Book – Steven Johnson writes, on BoingBoing, how he uses DevonThink to gather and organize his book thoughts and structure before actually sitting down to produce the words. I love reading about the act of literary creation (I have a long shelf of “how to write mystery novel” books that I can almost quote chapter and verse), the way it’s so different for every author yet so the output is so similar.
Four short links: 27 Jan 2009

Four short links: 27 Jan 2009

Fantasy, feedback, facts, and flies, all will be revealed in today’s links of loops and life:

  1. Blueful – a story told in text, but delivered through the medium of web sites. It’s like an xkcd cartoon embodied in the web. Interesting, artistic, and makes you look at web sites in a new way. From Aaron A. Reed.
  2. The Case Against Candy Land – Steven Johnson talks about how dull the children’s games of our youth are. “What’s irritating about the games is that they are exercises in sheer randomness. It’s not that they fail to sharpen any useful skills; it’s that they make it literally impossible for a player to acquire any skills at all.” Every process in life should have a feedback loop that lets you get better at it.
  3. Journo Data – a Guardian journalist publishes data resources about the US economy as Google spreadsheets. This is the start of something interesting, where the raw data is available from journalists not just the (textual or programmatic) interpretation. As mentioned in the fantastic presentation Tim just linked to, access to the data behind our world view is essential if we are to critically assess that world view.
  4. Userfly – a usability tool that records and then recreates your users’ sessions on your web site, so you can see where and when they type, click on, backtrack, etc. (via RWW)
Four short links: 7 Jan 2009

Four short links: 7 Jan 2009

Draw closer around the flickering firescreen, and hear four tales of brains, words, medical improvement, and the sharp ache of the wisdom teeth of the future poking through the soft gum of the 21st century as diagnosed by Dr Sterling.

  1. Mind Bites – Flickr set of findings from neuroscience on top of beautiful photos. Mind candy meets eye candy.
  2. Dr Johnson’s Dictionary – the original dictionary of the English language, reborn as a word a day blog. Love the old citations, e.g.

    A’DAGE. n.s. [adagium, Lat.] A maxim handed down from antiquity; a proverb.
    Shallow, unimproved intellects, that are confident pretenders
    to certainty; as if, contrary to the adage, science had no friend
    but ignorance. Glanville’s Scepsis Scientifica, c.2.
    Fine fruits of learning! old ambitious fool,
    Dar’st apply that adage of the school;
    As if ’tis nothing worth that lies conceal’d;
    And science is not science ’til reveal’d? Dryd. Pers. Sat. i.

  3. Peter Provonost – prevented untold infections in hospital procedures by instituting a simple checklist. This is a long article, but worth reading as it shows how to institute change. He was diligent, scientific, and worked with the teams instead of against them. For more like this, read The Best Practice: How the New Quality Movement is Transforming MedicineThe Best Practice by Charles Kenney, a fascinating look at the quality movement in healthcare.
  4. Bruce Sterling’s State of the World 2009 – I’m just skipping through reading Bruce’s responses. Some fabulous zingers that make me look forward to his presence at Webstock in February: “The Americans
    don’t have a place to offshore their money. They can offshore their
    LABOR, that’s dead easy, but their money? If the American dollar goes,
    finance as an industry gets the blue screen of death.
    . On urban reinvention: “Suppose you found some dead James Howard Kunstler strip-mall burg,
    bought it for a dollar, and turned it into “OpenSource-opolis” where
    every possible object and service was creatively commonized. Would
    that be heaven, hell — or what we’ve got now only different?”
    On netbooks + cloud slowing the upgrade cycle: “I’ve been a computer “consumer” for decades now, in the sense that I
    follow the trade press and buy computers regularly, but I dunno: if a
    $300 netbook running freeware lets me get the job done, 2009 may be the
    year when I just plain vanish off the radar.”
    . Oh forget it, as is always the way with Sterling every damn sentence is quotable—go read the whole thing yourself and enjoy.

Book Review: Nudge

This year has seen a glut of books on topics in that strange area occupied awkwardly by behavioural economics, cognitive psychology, and experimental philosophy. Some fail to distinguish themselves, merely rehashing the many ways in which we aren't perfectly rational creatures. Others, however, find an original angle to tack the last 30 years of work since Daniel Kahneman first thought…

Book Review: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Andy Hunt's Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (Pragmatic Press; 2008) teaches programmers how to master a subject, strategies for using your brain to its fullest, systems for learning, and the best ways to practice. The result is a grab-bag of pop-psych systems, practical strategies, and good old-fashioned inspiration that will give most programmers more footholds as they climb…

Select O'Reilly Books Soon on Kindle, and as Digital Ebook Bundles

Update: On his New York Times blog, David Pogue has noted O'Reilly's pilot in the context of the recent discussion prompted his column on ebooks and piracy (which brought insightful responses from Adam Engst and  Mike Masnick, along with a follow up from David). Ebooks are certainly nothing new for us at O'Reilly. We've offered PDFs of hundreds of our…

Thinking in Wikis

I clearly remember thinking, when I ordered my copy of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, "this has got to be a new low for O'Reilly. How can it be anything but a waste of a ream of paper?" I mean, "Wikipedia: it's an online encyclopedia that anyone can improve". There, what else is there to say? Throw in the URL and…

What's Keeping Adobe Up at Night? Probably Not Silverlight.

Roger Magoulas, our director of research, sent out the recent comment and graph as part of his weekly analysis of the latest load of our Bookscan-based data mart: What's keeping Adobe up at night? Probably not Silverlight. I noticed the Silverlight topic looking bright red [in the treemap visualization that shows week-to-week changes by topic] and thought I would…

Nice Slashdot Review of Programming Collective Intelligence

Checking the Amazon bestseller list recently, I was delighted to see Toby Segaran's Programming Collective Intelligence back among the top ten computer books on Amazon's Computer and Internet bestseller list. The book made it as high as #2 or #3 when it was published last year, but it's great to see it hitting the top of the charts again….

Dan Roam's "The Back of the Napkin"

I can't draw. Really. I'm a competent interaction designer, but my graphic design skills are those of a plankton. I can't draw on the right side or the left side of my brain. Yet, like everyone else in business and technology, I need to communicate. As so many studies — and common sense — show, we make decisions better (or,…