- Crowdsourcing Radiation Data in Japan (Freaklabs) — wardriving pollution detection.
- Backyard Brains — measuring electrical activity of a neuron in a cockroach leg. Astonishing how much science is within the reach of backyard hackers now. (via BoingBoing)
- Cotton Candy Stick Pre-Orders — a $200 Android computer on a USB stick, with HDMI out etc.
- Raspberry Pi Launches — $35 USB+CPU+video+audio ships. Interesting that both of these have come to fruition at the same time. Something is in the air. How will the world change when every memory stick is a computer, not just every phone?
"crowdsourcing" entries
Developer Week in Review: When game development met Kickstarter
From games to reference books, crowdsourcing is shaking up industries.
Crowdsourcing is changing how software development gets funded. It's also driving one of the great reference guides of the 20th century out of print.
Understanding place and space in a digital Babel
The nuances of location language.
Robert Munro, a computational linguist and speaker at Where 2012, says the subtleties of spatial distinctions are growing in importance as more of the world's digital information takes the form of non-English, unstructured text.
Four short links: 1 March 2012
Crowdsourced Monitoring, DIY Neurobio, A Plethora of Memory Stick Computers
Practical applications of data in publishing
The second in a series looking at the major themes of this year's TOC conference.
Several overriding themes permeated this year’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference. The second in a series looking at five of the major themes, here we take a look at data in publishing — how publishers can benefit, practical applications, and innovative ways it can be used.
Four short links: 22 February 2012
Hashbangs URLs Must Go, Cheap DNA Sequencing, Content Detection Fail, and Ubuntu on Android
- Hashbangs (Dan Webb) — why those terrible #! URLs are a bad idea. Looks like they’re going away with pushState coming to browsers. As Dan says, “URLs are forever”. Let’s get them right. I’m fascinated by how URLs are changing meaning and use over time.
- DNA Sequencing on a USB Stick — this has been going the rounds, but I think there’s a time coming when scientific data generation can be crowdsourced. I care about a particular type of fish, but it hasn’t been sequenced. Can I catch one, sequence it, upload the sequence, and get insight into the animal by automated detection of similar genes from other animals? Let those who care do the boring work, let scientists work on the analysis.
- The US Recording Industry is Stealing From Me (Bruce Simpson) — automated content detection at YouTube has created an industry of parasites who claim copyright infringement and then receive royalties from the ads shown on the allegedly infringing videos.
- Ubuntu on Android — carry a desktop in your pocket? Tempting. It’s for manufacturers, not something you install on existing handsets, which I’m sure will create tension with the open source world at Ubuntu’s heart. Then again, creating tension with the open source world at Ubuntu’s heart does seem to be Canonical’s core competency ….
Documentation strategy for a small software project: launching VoIP Drupal introductions
VoIP Drupal is a window onto the promises and challenges faced by a new open source project, including its documentation. A meeting at at MIT this week worked out some long-term plans for firming up VoIP Drupal's documentation and other training materials.
Can Maryland's other "CIO" cultivate innovation in government?
Bryan Sivak looks for ways to change the status quo.
Maryland's first chief innovation officer, Bryan Sivak, is looking for the levers that will help state government to be smarter, not bigger. From embracing collective intelligence to data-driven policy, Sivak is defining what it means to be innovative in government.
The ethics of the fail
Ben Huh on the responsibilities attached to other people's failures.
The content you see on Cheezburger, Inc.’s Fail Blog often mixes humor and pain — but not always in equal proportions. Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh discusses the boundaries of a fail.
Four short links: 8 December 2011
Hedonometrics and Twitter, Pricing Experiments, Crowdsourcing App Dev, and Flashcard Library
- Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter (PLOSone) — Tweets involving the ‘fake news’ comedian Stephen Colbert are both happier and of a higher information level than those concerning his senior colleague Jon Stewart. By contrast, tweets mentioning Glenn Beck are lower in happiness than both Colbert and Stewart but comparable to Colbert in information content.
- Pricing Experiments You Can Learn From — revealing the data from experiments which showed how to drive people towards higher prices.
- 10 Things I Learned at CrowdConf 2011 (Crowdflower) — Using his newly released crowdsourcing platform Coffee & Power, Philip [Rosedale] developed his entire company infrastructure and platform through a globally distributed workforce. 288 contributors in 127 locations worked together to get this startup off the ground in a whole new way. The Coffee & Power platform was built in 1,700 commits ranging from $6 quality checks all the way up to full source-code editing. One element of this process was developing the Hudat iPhone app. In less than a month for $2,485, the Coffee & Power community got this mobile app up and running.
- Andi — AGPL3-licensed spaced repetition flashcard system. (via Jack Kinsella)
Four short links: 7 December 2011
Free Service Isn't Sustainable, Big Data, Crowdsourced Historic Science, and Cognitive Biases
- Don’t Be a Free User (Maciej Ceglowski) — pay for your free services, else they’ll go away.
- Katta — Lucene for massive data sets in the cloud. (via Pete Warden)
- Old Weather — crowdsourced transcription of old nautical journals to yield historical information for climate researchers. (via National Digital Forum)
- Siddhartha Mukherjee Talks About Cancer (Guardian) — fascinating profile of the author of a “biography of cancer”. Touches on the cognitive biases we’re all prone to, and their damaging effects on patients. Mukherjee cites a study which found that women with breast cancer recalled eating a high-fat diet, whereas women without cancer did not. But the very same study had asked both sets of women about their diets long before any of them developed cancer, and the diet of those who now had breast cancer had been no more fatty than the rest (via Courtney Johnston)