"books" entries

Four short links: 13 December 2013

Four short links: 13 December 2013

China Making, Good Books, Robot Futures, and Ambient Information

  1. Bunnie Huang Live (YouTube) — talk given at the Make:Live Stage at Maker Faire NYC, covering his experiences and advice for getting hardware made. (via Makezine)
  2. Bill Gates’s Best Books of 2013 — interesting list!
  3. The Robots are Here (Tyler Cowan) — a bleak view of the future in which jobs that can be done by robots are done by robots, and concomitant power spiral towards the rich. I let this one sit for a while before posting, and I still think it’s wildly important.
  4. Philips Hue Lightbulb — awesome widely-available commercial ambient display.
Four short links: 6 December 2013

Four short links: 6 December 2013

AI Book, Science Superstars, Engineering Ethics, and Crowdsourced Science

  1. Society of Mind — Marvin Minsky’s book now Creative-Commons licensed.
  2. Collaboration, Stars, and the Changing Organization of Science: Evidence from Evolutionary BiologyThe concentration of research output is declining at the department level but increasing at the individual level. […] We speculate that this may be due to changing patterns of collaboration, perhaps caused by the rising burden of knowledge and the falling cost of communication, both of which increase the returns to collaboration. Indeed, we report evidence that the propensity to collaborate is rising over time. (via Sciblogs)
  3. As Engineers, We Must Consider the Ethical Implications of our Work (The Guardian) — applies to coders and designers as well.
  4. Eyewire — a game to crowdsource the mapping of 3D structure of neurons.
Four short links: 14 August 2013

Four short links: 14 August 2013

Downloading Kindle Highlights, Balanced Photos, Long Form, and Crap Regulation

  1. bookcision — bookmarklet to download your Kindle highlights. (via Nelson Minar)
  2. Algorithm for a Perfectly Balanced Photo Gallery — remember this when it comes time to lay out your 2013 “Happy Holidays!” card.
  3. Long Stories (Fast Company Labs) — Our strategy was to still produce feature stories as discrete articles, but then to tie them back to the stub article with lots of prominent links, again taking advantage of the storyline and context we had built up there, making our feature stories sharper and less full of catch-up material.
  4. Massachusetts Software Tax (Fast Company Labs) — breakdown of why this crappily-written law is bad news for online companies. Laws are the IEDs of the Internet: it’s easy to make massively value-destroying regulation and hard to get it fixed.
Four short links: 17 July 2013

Four short links: 17 July 2013

Augmented Reality Books, Open Source Success Patterns, Kernel Kourtesy, and Speculative Fiction

  1. Hideout — augmented reality books. (via Hacker News)
  2. Patterns and Practices for Open Source Software Success (Stephen Walli) — Successful FOSS projects grow their communities outward to drive contribution to the core project. To build that community, a project needs to develop three onramps for software users, developers, and contributors, and ultimately commercial contributors.
  3. How to Act on LKML — Linus’s tantrums are called out by one of the kernel developers in a clear and positive way.
  4. Beyond the Coming Age of Networked Matter (BoingBoing) — Bruce Sterling’s speculative short story, written for the Institute For The Future. “Stephen Wolfram was right about everything. Wolfram is the greatest physicist since Isaac Newton. Since Plato, even. Our meager, blind physics is just a subset of Wolfram’s new-kind-of- science metaphysics. He deserves fifty Nobels.” “How many people have read that Wolfram book?” I asked him. “I hear that his book is, like, huge, cranky, occult, and it drives readers mad.” “I read the forbidden book,” said Crawferd.
Four short links: 29 May 2013

Four short links: 29 May 2013

Notable Release, SVG Library, Modular Robot, and Factchecking Politicians Will Not Work

  1. Quick Reads of Notable New Zealanders — notable for two reasons: (a) CC-NC-BY licensed, and (b) gorgeous gorgeous web design. Not what one normally associates with Government web sites!
  2. svg.js — Javascript library for making and munging SVG images. (via Nelson Minar)
  3. Linkbot: Create with Robots (Kickstarter) — accessible and expandable modular robot. Loaded w/ absolute encoding, accelerometer, rechargeable lithium ion battery and ZigBee. (via IEEE Spectrum)
  4. The Promise and Peril of Real-Time Corrections to Political Misperceptions (PDF) — paper presenting results of an experiment comparing the effects of real-time corrections to corrections that are presented after a short distractor task. Although real-time corrections are modestly more effective than delayed corrections overall, closer inspection reveals that this is only true among individuals predisposed to reject the false claim. In contrast, individuals whose attitudes are supported by the inaccurate information distrust the source more when corrections are presented in real time, yielding beliefs comparable to those never exposed to a correction. We find no evidence of realtime corrections encouraging counterargument. Strategies for reducing these biases are discussed. So much for the Google Glass bullshit detector transforming politics. (via Vaughan Bell)
Four short links: 17 April 2013

Four short links: 17 April 2013

Software Archive, Self-Tracking, Provisioning, and Python Ciphers

  1. Computer Software Archive (Jason Scott) — The Internet Archive is the largest collection of historical software online in the world. Find me someone bigger. Through these terabytes (!) of software, the whole of the software landscape of the last 50 years is settling in. (And documentation and magazines and …). Wow.
  2. 7 in 10 Doctors Have a Self-Tracking Patientthe most common ways of sharing data with a doctor, according to the physicians, were writing it out by hand or giving the doctor a paper printout. (via Richard MacManus)
  3. opsmezzo — open-sourced provisioning tools from the Nodejitsu team. (via Nuno Job)
  4. Hacking Secret Ciphers with Pythonteaches complete beginners how to program in the Python programming language. The book features the source code to several ciphers and hacking programs for these ciphers. The programs include the Caesar cipher, transposition cipher, simple substitution cipher, multiplicative & affine ciphers, Vigenere cipher, and hacking programs for each of these ciphers. The final chapters cover the modern RSA cipher and public key cryptography.
Four short links: 8 March 2013

Four short links: 8 March 2013

Comparing Algorithms, Programming & Visual Arts, Data Brokers, and Your Brain on Ebooks

  1. mlcompa free website for objectively comparing machine learning programs across various datasets for multiple problem domains.
  2. Printing Code: Programming and the Visual Arts (Vimeo) — Rune Madsen’s talk from Heroku’s Waza. (via Andrew Odewahn)
  3. What Data Brokers Know About You (ProPublica) — excellent run-down on the compilers of big data about us. Where are they getting all this info? The stores where you shop sell it to them.
  4. Subjective Impressions Do Not Mirror Online Reading Effort: Concurrent EEG-Eyetracking Evidence from the Reading of Books and Digital Media (PLOSone) — Comprehension accuracy did not differ across the three media for either group and EEG and eye fixations were the same. Yet readers stated they preferred paper. That preference, the authors conclude, isn’t because it’s less readable. From this perspective, the subjective ratings of our participants (and those in previous studies) may be viewed as attitudes within a period of cultural change.
Four short links: 5 February 2013

Four short links: 5 February 2013

Web Tooltips, Free Good Security Book, Netflix Economics, and Firewire Hackery

  1. toolbar — tooltips in jQuery, cf hint.css which is tooltips in CSS.
  2. Security Engineering — 2ed now available online for free. (via /r/netsec)
  3. Economics of Netflix’s $100M New Show (The Atlantic) — Up until now, Netflix’s strategy has involved paying content makers and distributors, like Disney and Epix, for streaming rights to their movies and TV shows. It turns out, however, the company is overpaying on a lot of those deals. […] [T]hese deals cost Netflix billions.
  4. Inceptiona FireWire physical memory manipulation and hacking tool exploiting IEEE 1394 SBP-2 DMA. The tool can unlock (any password accepted) and escalate privileges to Administrator/root on almost* any powered on machine you have physical access to. The tool can attack over FireWire, Thunderbolt, ExpressCard, PC Card and any other PCI/PCIe interfaces. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 17 January 2013

Four short links: 17 January 2013

Free Books, Analytics Goofs, Book Boilerplate, and Learn CS with the Raspberry Pi

  1. Free Book Sifter — lists all the free books on Amazon, has RSS feeds and newsletters. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Realtime Analytics — a few key reasons why truly real-time analytics can open the door to a new type of (realtime!) bad decision making. [U]ser demographics could be different day over day. Or very likely, you could see a major difference in user behavior immediately upon releasing a change, only to watch it evaporate as users learn to use new functionality. Given all of these concerns, the conservative and reasonable stance is to only consider tests that last a few days or more.
  3. Web Book Boilerplate (Github) — uses plain old markdown and generates a well structured HTML version of your written words. Since it’s sitting on top of Pandoc and Grunt, you can easily make your books available for every platform. MIT-style license.
  4. Raspberry Pi Education Manual (PDF) — from Scratch to Python and HCI all via the Raspberry Pi. Intended to be informative and a series of lessons for teachers and students learning coding with the Raspberry Pi as their first device.
Four short links: 1 January 2013

Four short links: 1 January 2013

Silicon Beats Meat, Workers against Machines, Quora Design Notes, and Free Data Science Books

  1. Robots Will Take Our Jobs (Wired) — I agree with Kevin Kelly that (in my words) software and hardware are eating wetware, but disagree that This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that seems like drudgery will be done by robots. Civilizations which depend on specialization reward work and penalize idleness. We already have more people than work for them, and if we’re not to be creating a vast disconnected former workforce then we (society) need to get a hell of a lot better at creating jobs and not destroying them.
  2. Why Workers are Losing the War Against Machines (The Atlantic) — There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.
  3. Early Quora Design Notes — I love reading post-mortems and learning from what other people did. Picking a starting point is important because it will be the axis the rest of the design revolves around — but it’s tricky and not always the first page in the flow. Ideally, you should start with the page that serves the most significant goals of the product.
  4. Free Data Science BooksI don’t mean free as in some guy paid for a PDF version of an O’Reilly book and then posted it online for others to use/steal, but I mean genuine published books with a free online version sanctioned by the publisher. That is, “the publisher has graciously agreed to allow a full, free version of my book to be available on this site.” (via Stein Debrouwere)