"drones" entries

Four short links: 1 March 2013

Four short links: 1 March 2013

Drone Journalism, DNS Sniffing, E-Book Lending, and Structured Data Server

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 1, 2013
  1. Drone Journalism — two universities in the US have already incorporated drone use in their journalism programs. The Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska and the Missouri Drone Journalism Program at the University of Missouri both teach journalism students how to make the most of what drones have to offer when reporting a story. They also teach students how to fly drones, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations and ethics.
  2. passivedns — A network sniffer that logs all DNS server replies for use in a passive DNS setup.
  3. IFLA E-Lending Background Paper (PDF) — The global dominance of English language eBook title availability reinforced by eReader availability is starkly evident in the statistics on titles available by country: in the USA: 1,000,000; UK: 400,000; Germany/France: 80,000 each; Japan: 50,000; Australia: 35,000; Italy: 20,000; Spain: 15,000; Brazil: 6,000. Many more stats in this paper prepared as context for the International Federation of Library Associations.
  4. The god Architecture — a scalable, performant, persistent, in-memory data structure server. It allows massively distributed applications to update and fetch common data in a structured and sorted format. Its main inspirations are Redis and Chord/DHash. Like Redis it focuses on performance, ease of use and a small, simple yet powerful feature set, while from the Chord/DHash projects it inherits scalability, redundancy, and transparent failover behaviour.
Four short links: 28 February 2013

Four short links: 28 February 2013

Equity of Access, Smartphone Rare Earths, Nanoquadrocopter, and Macmillan Expands in Open Science

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 28, 2013
  1. Myth of the Free Internet (The Atlantic) — equity of access is an important issue, but this good point is marred by hanging it off the problematic (beer? speech? downloads?) “free”. I’m on the council of InternetNZ whose mission is to protect and promote the open and uncaptureable Internet. (A concept so good we had to make up a word for it)
  2. Periodic Table of the SmartPhone (PDF, big) — from Scientific American article on Rare Earth Minerals in the Smartphone comes a link to this neat infographic showing where rare earth elements are used in the iPhone. (via Om Malik)
  3. CrazyFlie Nano Preorders — 19g, 9cm x 9cm, 20min charge time for 7m flight time on this nano-quadrocopter. (via Wired)
  4. Changing Scientific Publishing (The Economist) — Nature buys an alternative journal publisher (30 titles in 14 scientific fields), which comes with an 80k-member social network for scientists. Macmillan are a clever bunch. (O’Reilly runs Science Foo Camp with Macmillan’s Digital Sciences and Google)
Four short links: 22 February 2013

Four short links: 22 February 2013

Indiepocalypse Continued, Unblockable p2p Twitter, Disposable Satellites, and iOS to HTML5

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 22, 2013
  1. Indiepocalypse: Harlem Shake Edition (Andy Baio) — “After four weeks topping the Billboard Hot 100, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop” was replaced this week by Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” the song that inspired the Internet meme.”
  2. SplinterNet — an Android app designed to create an unblockable Twitter like network that uses no cellular or Internet communications. All messages are transmitted over Bluetooth between users, creating a true peer-to-peer messaging system. All messages are anonymous to prevent retaliation by government authorities. (via Ushahidi)
  3. Disposable Satellites (Forbes) — “tiny, near-disposable satellites for use in getting battlefield surveillance quickly […] launched from a jet into orbit, and within a few minutes […] provide soldiers on the ground with a zoomed-in, birds-eye view of the battlefield. Those image would be transmitted to current communications devices, and the company is working to develop a way to transmit them to smartphones, as well.”
  4. Native iOS to HTML5 Porting Tool (Intel) — essentially a source-to-source translator that can handle a number of conversions from Objective-C into JavaScript/HTML5 including the translation of APIs calls. A number of open source projects are used as foundation for the conversion including a modified version of Clang front-end, LayerD framework and jQuery Mobile for widgets rendering in the translated source code. A porting aid, not a complete translator but a lot of the dog work is done. Requires one convert to Microsoft tools, however. (via Kevin Marks)
Four short links: 30 January 2013

Four short links: 30 January 2013

Cheap Attack Drones, Truth Filters, Where Musicians Make Money, and Dynamic Pricing From Digitized Analogue Signals

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 30, 2013
  1. Chinese Attack UAV (Alibaba) — Small attack UAV is characterized with small size, light weight, convenient carrying, rapid outfield expansion procedure, easy operation and maintenance; the system only needs 2-3 operators to operate, can be carried by surveillance personnel to complete the attack mission. (via BoingBoing)
  2. TruthTeller Prototype (Washington Post) — speech-to-text, then matches statements against known facts to identify truth/falsehoods. Still a prototype but I love that, in addition to the Real Time Coupon Specials From Hot Singles Near You mobile advertising lens, there might be a truth lens that technology helps us apply to the world around us.
  3. Money from Music: Survey Evidence on Musicians’ Revenue and Lessons About Copyright Incentives — 5,000 American musicians surveyed, For most musicians, copyright does not provide much of a direct financial reward for what they are producing currently. The survey findings are instead consistent with a winner-take-all or superstar model in which copyright motivates musicians through the promise of large rewards in the future in the rare event of wide popularity. This conclusion is not unfamiliar, but this article is the first to support it with empirical evidence on musicians’ revenue. (via TechDirt)
  4. Max Levchin’s DLD13 Keynote — I believe the next big wave of opportunities exists in centralized processing of data gathered from primarily analog systems. […] There is also a neat symmetry to this analog-to-digtail transformation — enabling centralization of unique analog capacities. As soon as the general public is ready for it, many things handled by a human at the edge of consumption will be controlled by the best currently available human at the center of the system, real time sensors bringing the necessary data to them in real time.
Four short links: 7 January 2013

Four short links: 7 January 2013

Building DroneNet, Manufacturing Help, Native Mobile Look, and Libre 3D Printing

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 7, 2013

  1. DroneNet: How to Build It (John Robb) — It’s possible to break the FAA’s “line of sight” rules regarding drones right now and get away with it to enable fast decentralized growth. This strategy works. e.g. PayPal flagrantly broke banking laws and regulations in order to out-compete a field of competitors that decided to follow the law. (via Daniel Bachhuber)
  2. How to Make a BOM (Bunnie Huang) — yet more very useful howto information for people looking into Chinese (or other) manufacturing.
  3. Junior — A front-end framework for building HTML5 mobile apps with a native look and feel.
  4. LulzBot — robust 3D printer, with full specs for making your own. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 14 December 2012

Four short links: 14 December 2012

Reviewing Peer Review, Two Drones One Bitbucket, The Past Was Awesome, and The Future Will Be Monitored By Drone

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 14, 2012
  1. Which Science to Fund: Time to Review Peer Review? (Peter Gluckman) — The study concluded that most funding decisions are a result of random effects dominated by factors such as who was the lead reviewer. In general the referee and panel review process is considered problematic. Few scientists are trained to fulfil such roles and bad peer review must result in unfair outcomes.
  2. A Bot’s Eye View (National Library of New Zealand) — Yeah, we filmed a drone with a drone.
  3. The Web We Lost (Anil Dash) — so much that has me thumping the table bellowing “YES!” in this, but I was particularly provoked by: Ten years ago, you could allow people to post links on your site, or to show a list of links which were driving inbound traffic to your site. Because Google hadn’t yet broadly introduced AdWords and AdSense, links weren’t about generating revenue, they were just a tool for expression or editorializing. The web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting links.
  4. The Robotics Revolution (Peter Singer) — Moore’s Law has come to warfare. It won’t be tens of thousands of today’s robots, but tens of thousands of tomorrow’s robots, with far different capabilities. […] The key to what makes a revolutionary technology is not merely its new capabilities, but its questions. Truly revolutionary technologies force us to ask new questions about what is possible that wasn’t possible a generation before. But they also force us to relook at what is proper. They raise issues of right and wrong that we didn’t have to wrestle with before.
Four short links: 11 December 2012

Four short links: 11 December 2012

Tasty Drones, Faux Reform, Trippy In-Flight Entertainment, and Money for Enviro-Drones

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 11, 2012
  1. Burrito Bomber — drone that delivers burritos. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Copyright Hardliners Adopt the Language of Reform — Sadly, in the end, Barnier’s “copyright fit for the Internet age” looks depressingly like the current, dysfunctional version: one based on a non-existent scarcity, on treating the public as passive consumers, and on pursuing unachievable enforcement goals with ever-harsher punishments.
  3. Mars and Sleep in Air New Zealand Flights (Idealog) — Air New Zealand in-flight entertainment to include advertisements for Martian timeshares and relaxing music set to a slow continuous shot along a New Zealand country road. Beats the hell out of the Nashville Top 20 channel and that gloaty “still many more hours to go!” map.
  4. Google Drones Target Poachers (World Wildlife Fund) — that’s not the real message of this piece, announcing Google has given a $5M grant to WWF to use technology to protect animals, but that’s the vision I have. I look forward to being able to switch on the reticule on Google Savannah View and smoke a few poachers straight from my phone’s maps app.
Four short links: 7 December 2012

Four short links: 7 December 2012

Drone Games, Bitcoin Bank, Antifragility, and Javascript Charts

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 7, 2012
  1. AR Drone That Infects Other Drones With Virus Wins DroneGames (IEEE) — how awesome is a contest where a group who taught a drone to behave itself on the end of a leash, constantly taking pictures and performing facial recognition, posting the resulting images to Twitter in real-time didn’t win.
  2. BitCoin-Central Becomes Legit Bank — After all this patient work and lobbying we’re finally happy and proud to announce that Bitcoin-Central.net becomes today the first Bitcoin exchange operating within the framework of European regulations. Covered by FDIC-equivalent, can have debit or credit cards connected to the BitCoin account, can even get your salary auto-deposited into your BitCoin account.
  3. The Antifragility of the Web (Kevin Marks) — By shielding people from the complexities of the web, by removing the fragility of links, we’re actually making things worse. We’re creating a fragility debt. Suddenly, something changes – money runs out, a pivot is declared, an aquihire happens, and the pent-up fragility is resolved in a Black Swan moment.
  4. xcharts (GitHub) — sweet charts in Javascript.
Four short links: 3 December 2012

Four short links: 3 December 2012

Manufacturing Returns, Android Mystery, 3D Printing Novelties, and Dropping Drones

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 3, 2012
  1. Manufacturing Returning to USA (The Atlantic) — because energy and wages. Oil makes shipping pricey, while “booming” US natural gas helps domestic manufacturing. Wages rising in China, dropping in America.
  2. The Android Engagement Mystery (Luke Wroblewski) — despite massively greater sales, Android users do less with their devices. Why?
  3. What’s Coming in 3D Printers (Wired) — enormous printers, printers that use sand to help with metal molding, and more.
  4. Drone Crashes Mount at Civilian Airports Overseas (Washington Post) — The drone crashed at a civilian airport that serves a half-million passengers a year, most of them sun-seeking tourists. No one was hurt, but it was the second Reaper accident in five months — under eerily similar circumstances.
Four short links: 30 November 2012

Four short links: 30 November 2012

Kids Design With Minecraft, MOOC Analysis, Hobbit Revisited, and Santa's Little Drones

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 30, 2012
  1. Kids Use Minecraft to Design School — “Students have been massively enthusiastic, with many turning up early to school to work on their Minecraft designs and they continue to do so at home too.” Also see the school’s blog.
  2. Napster, Udacity, and the Academy (Clay Shirky) — the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it. […] The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.
  3. The Hobbit, Redux — the main programmer for The Hobbit game was a woman. Under-credited, as usual.
  4. Aerial Drones — from the Make magazine holiday gift guide. I want five of everything, please Santa.