- Botnets and the Global Infection Rate (PDF) — fascinating insights into botnets, control tools, and business models.
- Atlassian Uses OpenSocial for Internal Integration — they use it inside their firewall to build a better dashboard. OpenSocial defines two concepts–an API for defining and working with social data (profiles, attributes, relationships) and specification for gadgets. OpenSocial’s fundamental promise was interoperability–write an application once and host it in multiple social networks. Sound familiar? That’s what we wanted to do with our own products.
- Professional Conference Video with Semi-Professional Equipment — How to make a great video of yourself giving a presentation, without having a cameraman to track you on stage. (I tried to tell my wife that I had semi-professional equipment, by the way, and it took a quarter of an hour for her to stop laughing.)
- Thoughts to Speech — tested on a stroke victim in his 20s who was able to think but not move, electrodes and a small FM transmitter were implanted between speech and motor centres of his brain. Neurites grew into the electrodes, and the signals sent to them are broadcast by the transmitter to an external receiver. From there a desktop computer runs software to figure out which muscles were being moved, and then makes the corresponding sound. It requires training, but is an exciting breakthrough in brain-computer connection.
ENTRIES TAGGED "conferences"
Building conference programs: it’s about the attendee
The essential principles of conference development.
I’ve chaired computer industry conferences for ten years now. First for IDEAlliance (XML Europe, XTech), and recently with O’Reilly Media (OSCON, Strata). Over the years I have tried to balance three factors as I select talks: proposal quality, important new work, and practical value of the knowledge to the attendees.
As the competition for speaking slots at both Strata and…
Confessions of a not-so-public speaker
If you want the tech community to have diversity, you need to be the change.
Stepping out of our comfort zones and into the spotlight at events (and encouraging others to do likewise) can help address the perception that the tech community is solely populated by young white guys.
Top Stories: October 31-November 4, 2011
An author turns to automation, a look at privacy in the age of big data, and a simple rule for data ethics.
This week on O'Reilly: Former author Robbie Allen explained his shift to software-generated writing, Terence Craig said transparency is the best way to handle digital privacy, and we learned how a simple question can keep data companies honest.
Five ways to improve publishing conferences
Conferences get stuck in ruts because we treat them like conferences.
Keynotes and panel discussions may not be the best way to program conferences. What if organizers instead structured events more like a great curriculum?
Sexual Harassment at Technical Conferences: A Big No-No
We don't condone harassment or offensive behavior, at our conferences or anywhere. It's counter to our company values. More importantly, it's counter to our values as human beings.
Putting conference distractions to good use
The Donahue app aims to sync conference presenters and audiences.
A new app created by Tim Meaney, partner at Arc90, and Christopher Fahey, founding partner at Behavior Design, taps into and harnesses conference distraction. Here's how it works.
Would I attend my own conference?
Why conferences need more diversity.
Conferences that want to be taken seriously by people who take other kinds of people seriously need more diversity among the speakers.
Four short links: 31 December 2009
BotNets, Integration, Conference Videos, and Brain Interfaces
Four Short Links: 20 Apr 2009
Camp, visualization, mistakes, and a wireless power meter hack:
- Toorcamp — two day hacker camp in a Titan-1 missile silo. The coolest venue evar? I think so.
- The Allosphere (TED) — JoAnn Kuchera-Morin demos the Allosphere, a planetarium-like sound-and-light visualization environment for scientific data. (via Lorrie Lejeune)
- The Mistake Bank — The Mistake Bank is a place to share stories of mistakes people have made in their lives and careers. Reminds me of the fail sessions at Foo Camp that Joshua Schachter leads.
- Tweet-a-Watt (Lady Ada) — add an XBee card to a Kill-a-Watt power meter to be able to read the current power load from afar.
Four short links: 3 Mar 2009
The problems of Creative Commons around the world, ebook futures, open source biomed research, and a new open source conference:
- The Case For and Against Creative Commons — skip straight to page two, where the article talks about the places around the world where CC isn’t working. “More exactly, they fear that if you try to convert artists to CC who had never thought of copyrighting their works before, they may simply fall in love with the concept of making money through full copyright and stick to it.” (via Paul Reynolds on a mailing list)
- Are We Having The Wrong Conversation About eBook Pricing? — “The first TV shows were basically radio programs on the television — until someone realized that TV was a whole new medium. Ebooks should not just be print books delivered electronically. We need to take advantage of the medium and create something dynamic to enhance the experience. I want links and behind the scenes extras and narration and videos and conversation…”. Yes, but radio shows still persist even though they’re delivered through the Internet. Old formats don’t have to die in the face of new media, the question is what’s best for a particular purpose. I read books on my iPhone as I go to sleep at night … I don’t want hypermedia linked videos and a backchannel. I don’t want the future of ebooks to be 1990s Shockwave CD-ROM “interactives”. (via Andrew Savikas’ delicious feed)
- Sage — “a new, not-for-profit medical research organization established in 2009 to revolutionize how researchers approach the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease. Sage’s objectives are: to build and support an open access platform and databases for building innovative new dynamic disease models; to interconnect scientists as contributors to evolving, integrated networks of biological data.” Apparently they’ll be seeded with a pile of high-resolution very expensive data from Merck.
(via BoingBoing) - Open Source Bridge — open source conference in Portland, OR, started to fill the void when OSCON moved to San Jose. Very open source: they show you all the proposals, and you can even subscribe to a feed of the proposals as they come in. Many look good, though I’m pretty sure that 1993 called and wants its Tcl back. This conference might be just the excuse I need to visit Portland.
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