- Cost-Effectiveness of Internet-Based Self-Management Compared with Usual Care in Asthma (PLoSone) — Internet-based self-management of asthma can be as effective as current asthma care and costs are similar.
- Apache Lucy — full-text search engine library written in C and targeted at dynamic languages. It is a “loose C” port of Apache Lucene™, a search engine library for Java.
- The Near Future of Citizen Science (Fiona Romeo) — near future of science is all about honing the division of labour between professionals, amateurs and bots. See Bryce’s bionic software riff. (via Matt Jones)
- Microsoft’s Patent Claims Against Android (Groklaw) — behold, citizen, the formidable might of Microsoft’s patents and how they justify a royalty from every Android device equal to that which you would owe if you built a Windows Mobile device: These Microsoft patents can be divided into several basic categories: (1) the ‘372 and ‘780 patents relate to web browsers; (2) the ‘551 and ‘233 patents relate to electronic document annotation and highlighting; (3) the ‘522 patent relates to resources provided by operating systems; (4) the ‘517 and ‘352 patents deal with compatibility with file names once employed by old, unused, and outmoded operating systems; (5) the ‘536 and ‘853 patents relate to simulating mouse inputs using non-mouse devices; and (6) the ‘913 patent relates to storing input/output access factors in a shared data structure. A shabby display of patent menacing.
"crowdsourcing" entries
Four short links: 15 November 2011
Internet Asthma Care, C Fulltext, Citizen Science, and Mozilla
When good feedback leaves a bad impression
Panagiotis Ipeirotis on the vagaries of semantic analysis and Mechanical Turk's quirks.
In a recent interview, NYU Professor Panagiotis Ipeirotis explained why a "good" online review is often perceived negatively. He also discussed Mechanical Turk's growing pains.
Wrap-up from FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google
Mixtures of grassroots content generation and unique expertise have existed, and more models will be found. Understanding the points of commonality between the systems will help us develop such models.
FLOSS Manuals books published after three-day sprint
Joining the pilgrimage that all institutions are making toward wider data use, FLOSS Manuals is exposing more and more of the writing process.
Day two of FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google Summer of Code summit
As a relatively conventional book, the KDE manual was probably a little easier to write (but also probably less fun) than the more high-level approaches taken by some other teams that were trying to demonstrate to potential customers that their projects were worth adopting.
Day one of FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google Summer of Code summit
Four teams at Google launched into endeavors that will lead, less than 72 hours from now, to complete books on four open source projects.
FLOSS Manuals sprint starts at Google Summer of Code summit
Four free software projects have each sent three to five volunteers to write books about the projects this week. Along the way we'll all learn about the group writing process and the particular use of book sprints to make documentation for free software.
Top Stories: September 26-30, 2011
The rise of crime-sourcing, wearable tech beckons, and a new twist in the mobile battle.
This week on O'Reilly: Marc Goodman revealed how criminals use crowdsourcing, we explored the link between wearable tech and at-a-glance moments, and Alasdair Allan explained why external accessories will be the focus of the next mobile battle.
From crowdsourcing to crime-sourcing: The rise of distributed criminality
How criminals are applying crowdsourcing techniques.
Crowdsourcing began as a way to tap the wisdom of crowds for the betterment of business and science. Crime groups have now repurposed the same tools and techniques for their own variation: "crime-sourcing."
Strata Week: Crowdsourcing and gaming spur a scientific breakthrough
Fold.it users make a scientific breakthrough, Twitter open sources real-time processing tool, Google faces a senate hearing.
In this week's data news: Fold.it gamers help with HIV research, Twitter eyes data analytics, and Google testifies before the Senate.