"books" entries

Four short links: 8 April 2016

Four short links: 8 April 2016

Data Security, Bezos Letter, Working Remote, and Deep Learning Book

  1. LangSecThe complexity of our computing systems (both software and hardware) have reached such a degree that data must treated as formally as code.
  2. Bezos’s Letter to Shareholders — as eloquent about success in high-risk tech as Warren Buffett is about success in value investing.
  3. Good Bad and Ugly of Working Remote After 5 Years — good advice, and some realities for homeworkers to deal with.
  4. Deep Learning Book — text finished, prepping print production via MIT Press. Why are you using HTML format for the drafts? This format is a sort of weak DRM required by our contract with MIT Press. It’s intended to discourage unauthorized copying/editing of the book.
Four short links: 25 March 2016

Four short links: 25 March 2016

Intro to Statistics, Automatic Lip Reading, Outdoor Range Finding for $10, and Wrongful Takedowns

  1. Intro Statistics with Randomization and Simulation — free PDF download as well as book for purchase. (via Flowing Data)
  2. Automated Lip Reading Invented — press release, but interesting topic. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Shanghai.
  3. A Smartphone-based Laser Distance Sensor for Outdoor Environments (PDF) — We present a low-cost, smartphone-based planar laser distance sensor design for outdoor use with 6 cm accuracy at 5 meters, 30 Hz scan rate, and 0.1 degree resolution over the field of view. The cost of the hardware additions to the off-the-shelf smartphone used in our prototype is under $50.
  4. Internet Archive Seeks to Defend Against Wrongful TakedownsIn its submission, the Archive goes to some lengths to highlight differences between those engaging in commercial piracy and those who seek to preserve and share cultural heritage. As a result, the context in which a user posts content online should be considered before attempting to determine whether an infringement has taken place. This, the organization says, poses problems for the “staydown” demands gaining momentum with copyright holders.
Four short links: 16 March 2016

Four short links: 16 March 2016

Analytic Monitoring, Commenter Demographics, Math and Empathy, and How We Read

  1. MacroBaseAnalytic monitoring for the Internet of Things. The code behind a research paper, written up in the morning paper where Adrian Colyer says, there is another story that also unfolds in the paper – one of careful system design based on analysis of properties of the problem space, of thinking deeply and taking the time to understand the prior art (aka “the literature”), and then building on those discoveries to advance and adapt them to the new situation. “That’s what research is all about!” you may say, but it’s also what we’d (I’d?) love to see more of in practitioner settings, too. The result of all this hard work is a system that comprises just 7,000 lines of code, and I’m sure, many, many hours of thinking!
  2. Survey of Commenters and Comment ReadersAmericans who leave news comments, who read news comments, and who do neither are demographically distinct. News commenters are more male, have lower levels of education, and have lower incomes compared to those who read news comments. (via Marginal Revolution)
  3. The Empathizing-Systemizing Theory, Social Abilities, and Mathematical Achievement in Children (Nature) — systematic thinking doesn’t predict math ability in children, but being empathetic predicts being worse at math. The effect is stronger with girls. The authors propose the mechanism is that empathetic children pick up a teacher’s own dislike of math, and any teacher biases like “girls aren’t good at math.”
  4. Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read (NYT) — On average, fewer than half of the books tested were finished by a majority of readers. Most readers typically give up on a book in the early chapters. Women tend to quit after 50 to 100 pages, men after 30 to 50. Only 5% of the books Jellybooks tested were completed by more than 75% of readers. Sixty percent of books fell into a range where 25% to 50% of test readers finished them. Business books have surprisingly low completion rates. Not surprisingly low to anyone who has ever read a business book. They’re always a 20-page idea stretched to 150 pages because that’s how wide a book’s spine has to be to visible on the airport bookshelf. Fat paper stock and 14-point text with wide margins and 1.5 line spacing help, too. Don’t forget to leave pages after each chapter for the reader’s notes. And summary checklists. And … sorry, I need to take a moment.
Four short links: 10 February 2016

Four short links: 10 February 2016

Bitcoin Textbook, Brain Books, Post-Quantum Crypto, and Amazon's Game Engine

  1. Princeton Bitcoin Book (PDF) — The Coursera course accompanying this book had 30,000 students in its first version, and it was a success based on engagement and end-of-course feedback. Large introduction to Bitcoin from Princeton. (via Cory Doctorow)
  2. A Quartet of Complementary Brain Books (Vaughan Bell) — The books have been chosen to complement each other and the idea is that if you read all four, you should have a solid grounding in modern cognitive neuroscience and beyond.
  3. NIST Report on Post-Quantum Cryptography (PDF) — in case you missed it, “post-quantum crypto” is “existing crypto relies on how hard it is to find the prime factors of large numbers, of which we suspect quantum computers may make a mockery. Wut to do?” The goal of post-quantum cryptography (also called quantum-resistant cryptography) is to develop cryptographic systems that are secure against both quantum and classical computers, and can interoperate with existing communications protocols and networks.
  4. Amazon Lumberyarda free, cross-platform, 3D game engine for you to create the highest-quality games, connect your games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans on Twitch. From Amazon.
Four short links: 12 January 2016

Four short links: 12 January 2016

Civilian Drone Market, Things Learned, Playful Things, and Bottom-up CS

  1. Overview of the Civilian Drone Market (DIY Drones) — Six categories: toy quadcopters; FPV/racing; consumer camera drones; prosumer camera drones; consumers, industrial, agricultural, NGO and Research drones; winged and VTOL drones.
  2. 52 Things I Learned in 2015 — very high strike rate of “interesting!”
  3. How to Turn Complicated Things into Playful Things (Tom Whitwell) — Children are the apex players, at the top of the hierarchy. Only when they’re absent will adults play. […] You know when play is working, because the room gets noisy.
  4. Bottom Up Computer ScienceA free, online book designed to teach computer science from the bottom end up. Topics covered include binary and binary logic, operating systems internals, toolchain fundamentals, and system library fundamentals.
Four short links: 29 December 2015

Four short links: 29 December 2015

Security Talks, Multi-Truth Discovery, Math Books, and Geek Cultures

  1. 2015 CCC Videos — collected talks from the 32nd Chaos Computer Congress conference.
  2. An Integrated Bayesian Approach for Effective Multi-Truth Discovery (PDF) — Integrating data from multiple sources has been increasingly becoming commonplace in both Web and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications to support collective intelligence and collaborative decision-making. Unfortunately, it is not unusual that the information about a single item comes from different sources, which might be noisy, out-of-date, or even erroneous. It is therefore of paramount importance to resolve such conflicts among the data and to find out which piece of information is more reliable.
  3. Direct Links to Free Springer Books — Springer released a lot of math books.
  4. A Psychological Exploration of Engagement in Geek CultureSeven studies (N = 2354) develop the Geek Culture Engagement Scale (GCES) to quantify geek engagement and assess its relationships to theoretically relevant personality and individual differences variables. These studies present evidence that individuals may engage in geek culture in order to maintain narcissistic self-views (the great fantasy migration hypothesis), to fulfill belongingness needs (the belongingness hypothesis), and to satisfy needs for creative expression (the need for engagement hypothesis). Geek engagement is found to be associated with elevated grandiose narcissism, extraversion, openness to experience, depression, and subjective well-being across multiple samples.
Four short links: 16 November 2015

Four short links: 16 November 2015

Hospital Hacking, Security Data Science, Javascript Face-Substitution, and Multi-Agent Systems Textbook

  1. Hospital Hacking (Bloomberg) — interesting for both lax regulation (“The FDA seems to literally be waiting for someone to be killed before they can say, ‘OK, yeah, this is something we need to worry about,’ ” Rios says.) and the extent of the problem (Last fall, analysts with TrapX Security, a firm based in San Mateo, Calif., began installing software in more than 60 hospitals to trace medical device hacks. […] After six months, TrapX concluded that all of the hospitals contained medical devices that had been infected by malware.). It may take a Vice President’s defibrillator being hacked for things to change. Or would anybody notice?
  2. Cybersecurity and Data Science — pointers to papers in different aspects of using machine learning and statistics to identify misuse and anomalies.
  3. Real-time Face Substitution in Javascript — this is awesome. Moore’s Law is amazing.
  4. Multi-Agent Systems — undergraduate textbook covering distributed systems, game theory, auctions, and more. Electronic version as well as printed book.
Four short links: 12 November 2015

Four short links: 12 November 2015

Capsule Robots, Magnifying Deviations, Maker Books, and DevOps Theory

  1. Pillforge — open source software and hardware for Medical capsule robots aka cm-size mechatronic devices designed to perform medical tasks inside the body. Open sourced by Vanderbilt’s research team.
  2. Deviation Magnification — sweet image processing from MIT. Shares a researcher with this even more crazy paper on amplifying inconsistencies in rows of things. Mind: blown.
  3. Maker Humble Bundle — DIY bundle, pay what you want, optionally contribute to MakerEd.
  4. The O-Ring Theory of DevOps (Adrian Colyer) — Small differences in quality (i.e, in how quickly and accurately you perform each stage of your DevOps pipeline) quickly compound to make very large differences between the performance of the best-in-class and the rest.
Four short links: 15 October 2015

Four short links: 15 October 2015

The Chinese Dream, Siri Hacked, Indirect Measures, and Boring Technology

  1. Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream (Amazon) — Clay Shirky’s new 128-page book/report about how Xiaomi exemplifies the balancing act that China has to perfect to navigate between cheap copies and innovation, between the demands of local and global markets, and between freedom and control. I’d buy Clay’s shopping list, the same way I’d gladly listen to Neil Gaiman telling the time. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Feed Siri Instructions From 16 Feet Away (Wired) — summary of a paywalled IEEE research paper Their clever hack uses those headphones’ cord as an antenna, exploiting its wire to convert surreptitious electromagnetic waves into electrical signals that appear to the phone’s operating system to be audio coming from the user’s microphone. […] It generates its electromagnetic waves with a laptop running the open source software GNU Radio, a USRP software-defined radio, an amplifier, and an antenna.
  3. User-Centered Design (Courtney Johnston) — the wall label should always give you cause to look back at the art work again. I love behaviour-based indirect measures of success like this.
  4. Choose Boring Technology (Dan McKinley) — going into the new hire required reading pile. See also the annotated slide deck.
Four short links: 16 June 2015

Four short links: 16 June 2015

Accessibility Testing, Time-Series Graphing, NO BUBBLE TO SEE HERE, and Technical Documentation

  1. axe — accessibility testing of web apps, so you can integrate accessibility testing into your continuous EVERYTHING pipeline.
  2. metrics-graphics — Mozilla Javascript library optimized for visualizing and laying out time-series data.
  3. US Tech Funding: What’s Going On? (A16Z) — deck eloquently arguing that this is no bubble.
  4. Teach Don’t Tellwhat I think good documentation is and how I think you should go about writing it. Sample common sense: This is obvious when you’re working face-to-face with someone. When you tell them how to play a C major chord on the guitar and they only produce a strangled squeak, it’s clear that you need to slow down and talk about how to press down on the strings properly. As programmers, we almost never get this kind of feedback about our documentation. We don’t see that the person on the other end of the wire is hopelessly confused and blundering around because they’re missing something we thought was obvious (but wasn’t). Teaching someone in person helps you learn to anticipate this, which will pay off (for your users) when you’re writing documentation.