"Creative Commons" entries

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: 7 September 2012

Four short links: 7 September 2012

Collections, Games, Accessibility, and Science

  1. GS-Collections (GitHub) — Goldman Sachs open-sourced (Apache-licensed) their Java collection library, full of lambda goodness. No report on whether it requires a 750G bailout.
  2. Learning ZIL — old manual for the interactive fiction programming language that Zork and other Infocom games were written in. Virtual machines on a Z80 processor? They were hardcore before your time.
  3. NZ Government Web Toolkit — information and guides on accessibility standards.
  4. Workshop on Research and Resource Commons in Scientific Research: Final ReportThis diverse group discussed the current state of policy and technology as it relates to a scientific research commons, and identified key opportunities and challenges, as well as next steps, for the scientific community in general and Creative Commons in particular. Wilbanks describes as, “Sort of a wrapup after seven years of SC.” (via John Wilbanks)
Four short links: 13 March 2012

Four short links: 13 March 2012

RoboTranslation, Basketball Visualization, Distributed Datasets, and UW's Open 3D Printing Lab Reopens

  1. Microsoft Universal Voice Translator — the promise is that it converts your voice into another language, but the effect is more that it converts your voice into that of Darth You in another language. Still, that’s like complaining that the first Wright Brothers flight didn’t serve peanuts. (via Hacker News)
  2. Geography of the Basketball Court — fascinating analytics of where NBA shooters make their shots from. Pretty pictures and sweet summaries even if you don’t follow basketball. (via Flowing Data)
  3. Spark Research — a programming model (“resilient distributed datasets”) for applications that reuse an intermediate result in multiple parallel operations. (via Ben Lorica)
  4. Opening Up — earlier I covered the problems that University of Washington’s 3D printing lab had with the university’s new IP policy, which prevented them from being as open as they had been. They’ve been granted the ability to distribute their work under Creative Commons license and are taking their place again as a hub of the emerging 3D printing world. (via BoingBoing)

Traditional vs self-publishing: Neither is the perfect solution

Dan Gillmor offers an author's perspective on choosing how to publish.

In this video podcast, author Dan Gillmor talks about the pros and cons of traditional publishing versus self-publishing.

Four short links: 13 December 2011

Four short links: 13 December 2011

Newton's Notebooks, Creative Commons, Node HTTP, and Data Business

  1. Newton’s Notebooks Digitised — wonderful for historians, professional and amateur. I love (a) his handwriting; (b) the pages full of long division that remind us what an amazing time-saver the calculator and then computer was; (c) use of “yn” for “then (the y is actually a thorn, pronounced “th”, and it’s from this that we get “ye”, actually pronounced pronounced “the”). All that and chromatic separation of light, inverse square law, and alchemical mysteries.
  2. Creative Commons Kicks Off 4.0 Round — public discussion process around issues that will lead to a new version of the CC licenses.
  3. Shred — an HTTP client library for node.js. (via Javascript Weekly)
  4. Holding Back the Age of Data (Redmonk) — Absent a market with well understood licensing and distribution mechanisms, each data negotiation – whether the subject is attribution, exclusivity, license, price or all of the above – is a one off. Very good essay into the evolution of a mature software industry into an immature data industry.
Four short links: 15 July 2011

Four short links: 15 July 2011

Gender on Forms, Glitch Gets God, Predictably? Irrational Web Sites, and Successfully Open

  1. The Gender Question — a clever solution to the vexed question of asking users for their gender. (via Luke Wroblewski)
  2. Katamari Damacy Creator Joins Glitch — an amazing coup for Stewart Butterfield’s new game.
  3. How Online Companies Get You to Spend More and Share More (Wired) — Dan Ariely (“Predictably Irrational”) tackles Amazon, Netflix, Groupon, etc. and shows how their web design ties into studies of our cognitive biases. This is great post-hoc analysis, but I’d love to know whether it’s predictive: can you say “do X, in line with study Y” and conversions always increase?
  4. The Power of Open — a collection of success stories around creators releasing Creative Commons-licensed works. Examples range from movies to TED talks to photos to music to books to education. High quality PDF for download for free, or pay for a print copy. (via Gabriella Coleman)

Publishing News: Apple shifts on subs

Apple softens its subscription position, metadata could improve academic searches, and ebooks offer a new purpose for edits.

In the latest Publishing News: Readability's co-founder Richard Ziade offers his take on Apple's policy reversal, Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers delve into web search, and Pete Meyers takes a look at the art of editing in storytelling.

Four short links: 2 June 2011

Four short links: 2 June 2011

Windows 8, CC YouTube, Corporate Innovation, and Crypto Lifetimes

  1. Building Windows 8 – Video #1 (YouTube) — lovely to see Microsoft’s operating system finally leaping past a 2002 look and feel.
  2. YouTube Offers Creative Commons Licensing (BoingBoing) — bravo!
  3. Redefiners Capturing Media Growth Dollars — Anil Dash’s corporate presentation about innovating within large (media) companies. The initial slides are money posturing to get the attention of the audience, but after that there’s some heavy-hitting drumming of the message: how to make startup success happen within big companies. Nothing new, but well said.
  4. Lifetimes of Crypto Hash Functions (Val Aurora) — in Nelson Minar’s words, “spoiler: not long”. Love the lifetime table at the bottom. (via Nelson Minar)
Four short links: 17 May 2011

Four short links: 17 May 2011

Sorting Out 9/11, Tagging Text, Unlocking Scientific Publishing, and Internet Archive's Meatspace Branch

  1. Sorting Out 9/11 (New Yorker) — the thorniest problem for the 9/11 memorial was the ordering of the names. Computer science to the rescue!
  2. Tagger — Python library for extracting tags (statistically significant words or phrases) from a piece of text.
  3. Free Science, One Paper at a Time (Wired) — Jonathan Eisen’s attempt to collect and distribute his father’s scientific papers (which were written while a federal employee, so in the public domain), thwarted by old-fashioned scientific publishing. “But now,” says Jonathan Eisen, “there’s this thing called the Internet. It changes not just how things can be done but how they should be done.”
  4. Internet Archive Launches Physical Archive — I’m keen to see how this develops, because physical storage has problems that digital does not. I’d love to see the donor agreement require the donor to give the archive full rights to digitize and distribute under open licenses. That’d put the Internet Archive a step in front of traditional archives, museums, libraries, and galleries, whose donor agreements typically let donors place arbitrary specifications on use and reuse (“must be inaccessible for 50 years”, “no commercial use”, “no use that compromises the work”, etc.), all of which are barriers to wholesale digitization and reuse.

Collaborative genetics, part 2: Five Easy Pieces, Sage's Federation

The second installment of this series, about a Sage Commons Congress on
the open-source sharing of genetic research, looks at the reasons
collaborative research is critical to finding new treatments.