- Nudge Policies Are Another Name for Coercion (New Scientist) — This points to the key problem with “nudge” style paternalism: presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions. This leaves the technocrats with no systematic way of detecting their own errors, correcting them, or learning from them. And technocracy is bound to blunder, especially when it is not democratically accountable. Take heed, all you Gov 2.0 wouldbe-hackers. (via BoingBoing)
- Country Selector — turns a dropdown into an autocomplete field where available. Very nice! (via Chris Shiflett)
- Ebook Users Wanted — Pew Internet & American Life project looking at ebooks, looking for people who use ebooks and tablet readers in libraries.
- The Public Library, Complete Reimagined (KQED) — the Fayetteville public library is putting in a fab lab. [L]ibraries aren’t just about books. They are about free access to information and to technology — and not just to reading books or using computers, but actually building and making things. (via BoingBoing)
"DIY" entries
Four short links: 11 November 2011
Technocracy's Blind Spot, Progressive Enhancement, Libraries and ebooks, and Library Fablab
Four short links: 8 November 2011
Cell Operating System, Search Savvy, Smiling Sliders, and Recommendation Tools
- Attempts to Make a Cell Operating System (Science Daily) — finally we will be able to have the guaranteed quality of software and the safety of biological organisms.
- Why Kids Can’t Search (Clive Thompson) — kids need to be taught critical thinking skills about what they find on the web. Librarians are our national leaders in this fight; they’re the main ones trying to teach search skills to kids today.
- Smiley Slider — cute little way to get feedback. (via Jyri Tuulos)
- LensKit — an open source toolkit for building, researching, and studying recommender systems.
The maker movement's potential for education, jobs and innovation is growing
"MAKE" founder Dale Dougherty was named a "Champion of Change" by the White House.
Dale Dougherty, one of the co-founders of O'Reilly Media, was honored by the White House as a "Champion of Change" for his work on "MAKE" Magazine, MakerFaire and the broader DIY movement.
Four short links: 25 October 2011
Smart Thermostat, Lamer News, Expensive Meaning, and Hardware Kits
- Nest Learning Thermostat — learns how long it takes your house to adjust temperature, so can tell you not just “it’s 55 now” but “it’ll be 65 in 16 minutes”. Looks gorgeous as well as being a good example of embedded intelligence. Data really does make everything better.
- lamernews (Github) — an implementation of a Reddit / Hacker News style news web site written using Ruby, Sinatra, Redis and jQuery.
- Information is Cheap, Meaning is Expensive — interview with George Dyson. That quote is a wonderful summary of why data is important. But George also says: The danger is not that machines are advancing. The danger is that we are losing our intelligence if we rely on computers instead of our own minds. On a fundamental level, we have to ask ourselves: Do we need human intelligence? And what happens if we fail to exercise it? (via Mathew Ingram)
- Cubelets, Littlebits, and Others (Russell Davies) — he’s been playing with some sweet hardware kits. It’s not new and surprising behaviour in a toy and it’s not unbuildable with Lego or Mecanno. But there’s something different and good about being able to do it so quickly, roughly and spontaneously – throwing bits together and getting behaviour out. Not following instructions or typing laboriously. That ease makes it magical and educational – you start to understand the functions of things as a builder not a thinker. (Slightly, you know, slightly – at a lego level, not at a 5-year engineering degree level, but it’s a start.)
Jason Huggins’ Angry Birds-playing Selenium robot
How a game-playing robot could help shape the future of mobile testing.
If you try to talk to Jason Huggins about Selenium, he'll probably do to you what he did to us. He'll bring his Arduino-based Angry Birds-playing testing robot to your interview and then he'll relate his invention to the larger problems of mobile application testing and cloud-based testing infrastructure.
Jason Huggins' Angry Birds-playing Selenium robot
How a game-playing robot could help shape the future of mobile testing.
If you try to talk to Jason Huggins about Selenium, he'll probably do to you what he did to us. He'll bring his Arduino-based Angry Birds-playing testing robot to your interview and then he'll relate his invention to the larger problems of mobile application testing and cloud-based testing infrastructure.
BioCurious opens its lab in Sunnyvale, CA
Inside a new DIY bio lab.
BioCurious has officially opened its first lab, with a mission of involving ordinary people off the street in biological experiments, using hands-on learning, and promoting open source hardware and software.
Four short links: 14 October 2011
Relativity in Short Words, Set Math, Design Inspiration, and Internet of Things
- Theory of Relativity in Words of Four Letters or Less — this does just what it says, and well too. I like it, as you may too. At the end, you may even know more than you do now.
- Effective Set Reconciliation Without Prior Context (PDF) — paper on using Bloom filters to do set union (deduplication) efficiently. Useful in distributed key-value stores and other big data tools.
- Mental Notes — each card has an insight from psychology research that’s useful with web design. Shuffle the deck, peel off a card, get ideas for improving your site. (via Tom Stafford)
- The Internet of Things To Come (Mike Kuniavsky) — Mike lays out the trends and technologies that will lead to an explosion in Internet of Things products. E.g., This abstraction of knowledge into silicon means that rather than starting from basic principles of electronics, designers can focus on what they’re trying to create, rather than which capacitor to use or how to tell the signal from the noise. He makes it clear that, right now, we have the rich petrie dish in which great networked objects can be cultured.
Looking for the future? Watch the "crackpots"
Tim O'Reilly and Charlie Rose discuss the drivers of new technology: enthusiasts.
The future of technology will be shaped by the passion of enthusiasts — this was a central point in a recent discussion between Tim O’Reilly and Charlie Rose.
High voltage music: Behind the scenes with ArcAttack
A look at the technology behind ArcAttack's Tesla coil music show.
ArcAttack creates a maniacal combination of music and mad science that uses half-million-volt Tesla coils to play songs. We caught up with Steve Ward, a recent addition to the ArcAttack crew, at MakerFaire NY and asked him about the technology behind the show.