"drones" entries

Four short links: 29 August 2012

Four short links: 29 August 2012

NeoVictorian Computing, Participatory Budgeting, Micro Thrusters, and Geopositioning Accuracy

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 29, 2012
  1. NeoVictorian Computing (Mark Bernstein) — read this! I think we all woke up one day to find ourselves living in the software factory. The floor is hard, from time to time it gets very cold at night, and they say the factory is going to close and move somewhere else. […] The Arts & Crafts movement failed in consumer goods, but it could succeed in software. (via James Governor)
  2. Participatory Budgeting — research shows participation is more effective than penalties in taxation compliance. Participation is more effective than penalties in almost everything.
  3. MIT-Developed Microthrusters — a flat, compact square — much like a computer chip — covered with 500 microscopic tips that, when stimulated with voltage, emit tiny beams of ions. Together, the array of spiky tips creates a small puff of charged particles that can help propel a shoebox-sized satellite forward. You say satellite, but it’s only a matter of time until this powers a DIY RC rocket with a camera payload. (via Hacker News)
  4. Yelp Checkins to Measure Geopositioning Accuracy Across Phones — By analyzing millions of data points, we can easily see how, on average, different platforms perform. iPhones consistently have the most accurate positioning, with a fairly small accuracy radius. Android phones are often inaccurate, but reliably reported that inaccuracy. And finally, iPods using Wi-Fi positioning proved the least accurate and usually reported incorrect accuracy radii.
Four short links: 23 August 2012

Four short links: 23 August 2012

Computational Social Science, Infrastructure Drives Design, Narcodrones Imminent, and Muscle Memory

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 23, 2012
  1. Computational Social Science (Nature) — Facebook and Twitter data drives social science analysis. (via Vaughan Bell)
  2. The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy (Slate) — Companies like Ikea have literally designed products around pallets: Its “Bang” mug, notes Colin White in his book Strategic Management, has had three redesigns, each done not for aesthetics but to ensure that more mugs would fit on a pallet (not to mention in a customer’s cupboard). (via Boing Boing)
  3. Narco Ultralights (Wired) — it’s just a matter of time until there are no humans on the ultralights. Remote-controlled narcodrones can’t be far away.
  4. Shortcut Foo — a typing tutor for editors, photoshop, and the commandline, to build muscle memory of frequently-used keystrokes. Brilliant! (via Irene Ros)
Four short links: 10 August 2012

Four short links: 10 August 2012

Coffee Rings, Scaling Laws, Autonomous Aircraft, and Dreaming Computers

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 10, 2012
  1. The Coffee-Ring Effect (YouTube) — beautiful video of what happens in liquids as they evaporate, explaining why coffee stains are rings, and how to create liquids with even evaporative coating.
  2. The Importance of Quantitative Thinking Medicine (PDF) — scaling laws underly aging, metabolism, drug delivery, BMI, and more. Full of wow moments, like Fractals are a common feature of many complex systems ranging from river networks, earthquakes, and the internet to stock markets and cities. […] Geometrically, the nested levels of continuous branching and crenulations inherent in fractal­like structures optimise the transport of information, energy, and resources by maximising the surface areas across which these essential features of life flow within any volume. Because of their fractal nature, these effective surface areas are much larger than their apparent physical size. For example, even though the volume of our lungs is about 5–6 L, the total surface area of all the alveoli is almost the size of a tennis court and the total length of airways is about 2500 km. Even more striking is that if all the arteries, veins, and capillaries of an individual’s circulatory system were laid end to end, its total length would be about 100000 km, or nearly two and a half times around the earth.
  3. Autonomous Robotic Plane at MIT (YouTube) — hypnotic to watch it discover the room. A product of the Robust Robotics Group at MIT.
  4. Electric Sheep — hypnotic screensaver, where the sleeping computers collaborate on animations. You can vote up or down the animation on your screen, changing the global gene pool. Popular animations survive and propagate.
Four short links: 31 July 2012

Four short links: 31 July 2012

Urban Design, Vehicle Interfaces, Maldrones, and Cloud Translation

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 31, 2012
  1. Christchurch’s Shot at Being Innovation Central (Idealog) — Christchurch, rebuilding a destroyed CBD after earthquakes, has released plans for the new city. I hope there’s budget for architects and city developers to build visible data, sensors, etc. so the Innovation Precinct doesn’t become the Tech Ghetto.
  2. Torque Pro (Google Play Store) — a vehicle / car performance/diagnostics tool and scanner that uses an OBD II Bluetooth adapter to connect to your OBD2 engine management/ECU. Can lay out out your dashboards, track performance via GPS, and more. (via Steve O’Grady)
  3. Drone Pilots (NY Times) — at the moment, the stories are all about the technology helping our boys valiantly protecting the nation. Things will get interesting when the new technology is used against us (we just saw the possibility of this with 3D printing guns). (via Dave Pell)
  4. Avalon (GitHub) — A cloud based translation and localization utility for Python which combines human and machine translation. There’s also a how-to. (via Brian McConnell)
Four short links: 26 July 2012

Four short links: 26 July 2012

Drone Overload, Mac MySQL Tool, Better Cancer Diagnosis Through AI, and Inconstant Identifiers

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 26, 2012
  1. Drones Over Somalia are Hazard to Air Traffic (Washington Post) — In a recently completed report, U.N. officials describe several narrowly averted disasters in which drones crashed into a refu­gee camp, flew dangerously close to a fuel dump and almost collided with a large passenger plane over Mogadishu, the capital. (via Jason Leopold)
  2. Sequel Pro — free and open source Mac app for managing MySQL databases. It’s an update of CocoaMySQL.
  3. Neural Network Improves Accuracy of Least Invasive Breast Cancer Test — nice use of technology to make lives better, for which the creator won the Google Science Fair. Oh yeah, she’s 17. (via Miss Representation)
  4. Free Harder to Find on Amazon — so much for ASINs being permanent and unchangeable. Amazon “updated” the ASINs for a bunch of Project Gutenberg books, which means they’ve lost all the reviews, purchase history, incoming links, and other juice that would have put them at the top of searches for those titles. Incompetence, malice, greed, or a purely innocent mistake? (via Glyn Moody)
Four short links: 23 July 2012

Four short links: 23 July 2012

Drone Show, Ads, GitHub's Importance, and Crowdfunding Science

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 23, 2012
  1. Unmanned Systems North America 2012 — huge tradeshow for drones. (via Directions Magazine)
  2. On Thneeds and the Death of Display Ads (John Battelle) — the video interstitial. Once anathema to nearly every publisher on the planet, this full page unit is now standard on the New York Times, Wired, Forbes, and countless other publishing sites. And while audiences may balk at seeing a full-page video ad after clicking from a search engine or other referring agent, the fact is, skipping the ad is about as hard as turning the page in a magazine. And in magazines, full page ads work for marketers. If you’d raised a kid on AdBlocker, and then at age 15 she saw the ad-filled Internet for the first time, she’d think her browser had been taken over by malware. (via Tim Bray)
  3. The Most Important Social Network: GitHub — I suspect that GitHub’s servers now contain the world’s largest corpus of commentary around intellectual production.
  4. Crowdfunded Genomics — a girl with a never-before-seen developmental disorder had her exome (the useful bits of DNA) sequenced, and a never-before-seen DNA mutation found. The money for it was raised by crowdfunding. (via Ed Yong)
Four short links: 20 July 2012

Four short links: 20 July 2012

Turning Drones, Censoring Cloud, Trolling for America, and Thinging the Internets

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 20, 2012
  1. Intercepted Drones — The demonstration of the near-disaster, led by Professor Todd Humphreys and his team at the UTA’s Radionavigation Laboratory, points to a “gaping hole” in the US’s plan to open US airspace to thousands of drones, Fox noted: namely, drones can be turned into weapons, given the right equipment. Drones are AI for the physical world: disconnected agents, unsettling because they live in this uncanny valley of almost-independence. Military drones are doubly disconcerting. If von Clauswitz were around today, he’d say drones are the computation of politics by other means.
  2. Microsoft Censors Its Cloud Storage Service — upload porn, get your accounts (all your Microsoft accounts) frozen.
  3. Uncle Sam Wants You … to Troll (Wired) — Amanullah has a different view. You don’t necessarily need to deface the forums if you can troll them to the point where their most malign influences are neutralized.
  4. Wroblewski’s Theorem — “Anything that can be connected to the Internet, will be.”