ENTRIES TAGGED "culture"
Open Source Metrics, BitTorrent to TV, Tumblr Value, and Variable Fiction
- Open Source Metrics — Talking about the health of the project based on a single metric is meaningless. It is definitely a waste of time to talk about the health of a project based on metrics like number of software downloads and mailing list activities. Amen!
- BitTorrent To Your TV — The first ever certified BitTorrent Android box goes on sale today, allowing users to stream files downloaded with uTorrent wirelessly to their television. The new set-top box supports playback of all popular video formats and can also download torrents by itself, fully anonymously if needed. (via Andy Baio)
- Tumblr URL Culture — the FOO.tumblr.com namespace is scarce and there’s non-financial speculation. People hoard and trade URLs, whose value is that they say “I’m cool and quirky”. I’m interested because it’s a weird largely-invisible Internet barter economy. Here’s a rant against it. (via Beta Knowledge)
- Design-Fiction Slider Bar of Disbelief (Bruce Sterling) — I love the list as much as the diagram. He lays out a sliding scale from “objective reality” to “holy relics” and positions black propaganda, 419 frauds, design pitches, user feedback, and software code on that scale (among many other things). Bruce is an avuncular Loki, pulling you aside and messing with your head for your own good.
Design Trends, Researching Online Culture, Choosing Connection, and 3D Printing Creativity
- 13 Design Trends for 2013 — many of these coalesced what I’ve seen in websites recently, but I was particularly intrigued by the observation that search’s growing importance to apps is being reflected in larger searchboxes.
- How Twitter Gets In The Way of Research (Buzzfeed) — tl;dr: our culture increasingly plays outline, but scraping and otherwise getting access to the data stream of online culture sees researchers struggling in the face of data volumes and Twitter et al.’s commercial imperatives.
- The Post-Productive Economy (Kevin Kelly) — The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. To them, this is not a hypothetical choice at all, but a real one. and they have made their decision in massive numbers. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, if not billions of people in the rest of Asia, Africa and South America have chosen Option B. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers’ homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. (I know they don’t have a toilet because I’ve stayed in many of their homes.) But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water.
- Crayon Creatures — We will bring to life the kid’s artwork by modeling a digital sculpture and turning it into a real object using 3D Printing technology.
Top Chinese Memes, Raising Quality, Retro Browsing, and The Clicks of the Dead
- Top 10 Chinese Internet Memes of 2012 — most are political, unlike Overly Attached Girlfriend.
- Evaporative Cooling — thoughtful piece about the tendency of event quality to trend down unless checked by invisible walls. (via Hacker News)
- What Was It Like to Browse the Web in the 90s? (Quora) — it was awesome, because the alternative was television. Couple of whiny “you won’t believe how hard we had it” posts, from people who obviously believe that everyone in history has been miserable because they don’t have it as good as we do now. And, thus, by extension, we are miserable because we don’t have it as good as future generations of silver-robot-bearing flying-car-driving humans.
- Why Are Dead People Liking Stuff on Facebook? (ReadWrite Web) — a good question.
Turing Complete Users, Live Bootstrap Editor, Remix Exemptions, and Automatically Strengthening 3D Designs
- Turing Complete User — General Purpose Users can write an article in their e-mail client, layout their business card in Excel and shave in front of a web cam. They can also find a way to publish photos online without flickr, tweet without twitter, like without facebook, make a black frame around pictures without instagram, remove a black frame from an instagram picture and even wake up at 7:00 without a “wake up at 7:00” app. [... They are] users who have the ability to achieve their goals regardless of the primary purpose of an application or device. (via BoingBoing)
- Bootstrap Live Editor — a WYSIWYG HTML5 Editor built for Bootstrap. It offers a nice and elegant way to edit and beautify html content with Bootstrap-ready UI elements. I love how Bootstrap has become this framework for simpler website creation. I’m just disappointed they’re all startups chasing $ instead of being open source infrastructure.
- DCMA Exemption Recommended for Remix — recommended expanding the noncommercial remix exemption to cover both DVDs and online services. The reference to “motion pictures” covers “movies, television shows, commercials, news, DVD extras, etc.”
- New Tool Gives Structural Strength to 3-D Printed Works (Science Daily) — Findings were detailed in a paper presented during the SIGGRAPH 2012 conference in August. Former Purdue doctoral student Ondrej Stava created the software application, which automatically strengthens objects either by increasing the thickness of key structural elements or by adding struts. The tool also uses a third option, reducing the stress on structural elements by hollowing out overweight elements. (via BoingBoing)
Sandy's Latency, Better Buttons, Inside Chargers, and Hidden Warranties
- Fastly’s S3 Latency Monitor — The graph represents real-time response latency for Amazon S3 as seen by Fastly’s Ashburn, VA edge server. I’ve been watching #sandy’s effect on the Internet in real-time, while listening to its effect on people in real-time. Amazing.
- Button Upgrade (Gizmodo) — elegant piece of button design, for sale on Shapeways.
- Inside a Dozen USB Chargers — amazing differences in such seemingly identical products. I love the comparison between genuine and counterfeit Apple chargers. (via Hacker News)
- Why Products Fail (Wired) — researcher scours the stock market filings of publicly-listed companies to extract information about warranties. Before, even information like the size of the market—how much gets paid out each year in warranty claims—was a mystery. Nobody, not analysts, not the government, not the companies themselves, knew what it was. Now Arnum can tell you. In 2011, for example, basic warranties cost US manufacturers $24.7 billion. Because of the slow economy, this is actually down, Arnum says; in 2007 it was around $28 billion. Extended warranties—warranties that customers purchase from a manufacturer or a retailer like Best Buy—account for an estimated $30.2 billion in additional claims payments. Before Arnum, this $60 billion-a-year industry was virtually invisible. Another hidden economy revealed. (via BoingBoing)
3D Printing Art, Speedy Web, Display Divergence, and 3D Printing Science
- Liz Neely Talks 3D Digitisation, 3D Printing (Seb Chan) — On July 19th, Tom and Mike Moceri arrived at the Art Institute dock in a shiny black SUV with a BATMAN license plate and a trunk packed with a couple Makerbots. Our event was different from #Met3D in that we focused on allowing staff to experience 3D scanning and printing first hand. We began the day using iPads and 123D Catch to scan artworks. In the afternoon, the two Makerbots started printing in our Ryan Education Center and Mike demonstrated modelling techniques, including some examples using a Microsoft Kinect.
- Keys to a Fast Web App (Steve Souders) — I’m obsessed with caching. It’s the biggest missed opportunity and so I’m going to spend the next few months focused on caching. Analyzing caching is difficult. In the lab it’s hard (and time consuming) to test filling and clearing the cache. There’s no caching API that makes it easy to manipulate and measure.
- So Many Devices (Luke Wroblewski) — so many different screen sizes and pixel densities to worry about.
- 3D-Printed Tools in the DeRisi Lab — “There’s hardly a microscope in our building that does not have some 3D-printed part on it.” —Joseph DeRisi, UCSF.
Minecraft Devastation, Constructive Dialog, Oatmeal Rocks, and Pwning Printers
- Minecraft Experiment Devolves into Devastating Resource War — life imitates art, but artificial life imitates, well, Haiti.
- Finding Unity in the Math Wars — I recently heard a quote about constructive dialog: “Don’t argue the exact point a person made. Consider their position and respond to the best point they could have made.” I like this! (and the point that math teachers fighting with each other is missing an opportunity to fight for the existence of math education) (ps, “unity … math”, I see what you did there)
- Tesla Museum Funded — Matthew Inman, cartoonist behind The Oatmeal, used IndieGogo to raise over $850k to buy Tesla’s old building in New York and turn it into a museum. In five days. There are still 39 days to run. Impressive channeling of his audience for good.
- Printers Spontaneously Printing “SQL” Strings (Hacker News) — it’s a sign that someone’s scanning your network for vulnerable web apps, found the exposed printer port, and sent an malignant HTTP request to it.
Talking About Your Product, Moving On, Visible Turk, and Digital Nativity
- What Twitter’s API Anouncement Could Have Said (Anil Dash) — read this and learn. Anil shows how powerful it is to communicate from the perspective of the reader. People don’t care about your business model or platform changes except as it applies to them. Focus on what you’re doing for the user, because that’s why you make every change–right? Your average “we’ve changed things” message focuses on the platform not the user: “*we* changed things for *our* reasons” and the implicit message is because *we* have all the power”. Anil’s is “you just got this Christmas present, because we are always striving to make things better for you!”. If it’s deceitful bullshit smeared over an offensive money grab, the reader will smell it. But if you’re living life right, you’re telling the truth. And they can smell that, too.
- Goodbye, Everyblock — Adrian Holovaty is moving on and ready, once more, to make something awesome.
- Turkopticon — transparency about crappy microemployers for people who work on Mechanical Turk. (via Beta Knowledge)
- Digital Natives, 10 Years After (PDF) — we need to move away from this fetish of insisting in naming this generation the Digital/Net/Google Generation because those terms don’t describe them, and have the potential of keeping this group of students from realizing personal growth by assuming that they’ve already grown in areas that they so clearly have not.
Studying Newspapers, Explaining Psychology, Pathology of Stuff, and Petite Javascript
- What’s Next for Newspapers? — three approaches: Farm it [...] Milk it [...] Feed it. (via Stijn Debrouwere)
- Why The Fundamental Attribution Error Exists (MindHacks) — assuming causation, rather than luck or invisible effects, is how we learn.
- Stuff Makes Us Sad (Boston.com) — The scientists working with UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families studied the dual-income families the same way they would animal subjects. They videotaped the activities of family members, tracked their moves with position-locating devices, and documented their homes, yards, and activities with thousands of photographs. They even took saliva samples to measure stress hormones. Studying our lives with an eye to understanding and improving it: the qualified self. (Long story short, as Cory Doctorow summarized: Stuff makes us sad)
- chibi (GitHub) — A tiny JavaScript micro-framework.
OpenROV Funded, Teen Surprises, Crowdsourced Net Transparency, and Like Humour
- OpenROV Funded in 1 Day (Kickstarter) — an open source robotic submarine designed to make underwater exploration possible for everyone. (via BoingBoing)
- McAfee Digital Divide Study (PDF) — lots of numbers showing parents are unaware of what their kids do. (via Julie Starr)
- Herdict — crowdsourced transparency to reveal who is censoring what online. (via Twitter)
- You Really Really Like Me (NY Times) — cute collection of visual riffs on “like” and “tweet this” iconography. I like my humour pixellated.
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