ENTRIES TAGGED "education"
Master Coding, Rethinking Textbooks, Blocking Open Access, VPN from your Pi
- Analyzing mbostock’s queue.js — beautiful walkthrough of a small library, showing the how and why of good coding.
- What Job Would You Hire a Textbook To Do? (Karl Fisch) — notes from a Discovery Education “Beyond the Textbook” event. The issues Karl highlights for textbooks (why digital, etc.) are there for all books as we create this new genre.
- Neutralizing Open Access (Glyn Moody) — the publishers appear to have captured the UK group implementing the UK’s open access policy. At every single step of the way, the RCUK policy has been weakened. From being the best and most progressive in the world, it’s now considerably weaker than policies already in action elsewhere in the world, and hardly represents an increment on their 2006 policy. What’s at stake? Opportunity to do science faster, to provide source access to research for the public, and to redirect back to research the millions of pounds spent on journal subscriptions.
- Turn the Raspberry Pi into a VPN Server (LinuxUser) — One possible scenario for wanting a cheap server that you can leave somewhere is if you have recently moved away from home and would like to be able to easily access all of the devices on the network at home, in a secure manner. This will enable you to send files directly to computers, diagnose problems and other useful things. You’ll also be leaving a powered USB hub connected to the Pi, so that you can tell someone to plug in their flash drive, hard drive etc and put files on it for them. This way, they can simply come and collect it later whenever the transfer has finished.
Machine Learning Demos, iOS Debugging, Industrial Internet, and Deanonymity
- MLDemos — an open-source visualization tool for machine learning algorithms created to help studying and understanding how several algorithms function and how their parameters affect and modify the results in problems of classification, regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, dynamical systems and reward maximization. (via Mark Alen)
- kiln (GitHub) — open source extensible on-device debugging framework for iOS apps.
- Industrial Internet — the O’Reilly report on the industrial Internet of things is out. Prasad suggests an illustration: for every car with a rain sensor today, there are more than 10 that don’t have one. Instead of an optical sensor that turns on windshield wipers when it sees water, imagine the human in the car as a sensor — probably somewhat more discerning than the optical sensor in knowing what wiper setting is appropriate. A car could broadcast its wiper setting, along with its location, to the cloud. “Now you’ve got what you might call a rain API — two machines talking, mediated by a human being,” says Prasad. It could alert other cars to the presence of rain, perhaps switching on headlights automatically or changing the assumptions that nearby cars make about road traction.
- Unique in the Crowd: The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility (PDF, Nature) — We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier’s antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the 1/10 power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual’s privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals. As Edd observed, “You are a unique snowflake, after all.” (via Alasdair Allan)
Analytics vs Learning, Reproducible Science, Ramping up Military Internet Attacks, and Compressed Sensing
- Analytics for Learning — Since doing good learning analytics is hard, we often do easy learning analytics and pretend that they are good instead. But pretending doesn’t make it so. (via Dan Meyer)
- Reproducible Research — a list of links to related work about reproducible research, reproducible research papers, etc. (via Stijn Debrouwere)
- Pentagon Deploying 100+ Cyber Teams — The organization defending military networks — cyber protection forces — will comprise more than 60 teams, a Pentagon official said. The other two organizations — combat mission forces and national mission forces — will conduct offensive operations. I’ll repeat that: offensive operations.
- Towards Deterministic Compressed Sensing (PDF) — instead of taking lots of data, compressing by throwing some away, can we only take a few samples and reconstruct the original from that? (more mathematically sound than my handwaving explanation). See also Compressed sensing and big data from the Practical Quant. (via Ben Lorica)
HTML DRM, Visualizing Medical Sciences, Lifelong Learning, and Hardware Hackery
- What Tim Berners-Lee Doesn’t Know About HTML DRM (Guardian) — Cory Doctorow lays it out straight. HTML DRM is a bad idea, no two ways. The future of the Web is the future of the world, because everything we do today involves the net and everything we’ll do tomorrow will require it. Now it proposes to sell out that trust, on the grounds that Big Content will lock up its “content” in Flash if it doesn’t get a veto over Web-innovation. [...] The W3C has a duty to send the DRM-peddlers packing, just as the US courts did in the case of digital TV.
- Visualizing the Topical Structure of the Medical Sciences: A Self-Organizing Map Approach (PLOSone) — a high-resolution visualization of the medical knowledge domain using the self-organizing map (SOM) method, based on a corpus of over two million publications.
- What Teens Get About The Internet That Parents Don’t (The Atlantic) — the Internet has been a lifeline for self-directed learning and connection to peers. In our research, we found that parents more often than not have a negative view of the role of the Internet in learning, but young people almost always have a positive one. (via Clive Thompson)
- Portable C64 — beautiful piece of C64 hardware hacking to embed a screen and battery in it. (via Hackaday)
Ransom Money, High School CS, Wikipedia Links, and Social Teens
- Adventures in the Ransom Trade — between insurance, protection, and ransoms, Sean Gourley describes it as “one of the more interesting grey markets.” (via Sean Gourley)
- About High School Computer Science Teachers (Selena Deckelmann) — Selena gets an education in the state of high school computer science education.
- Learning From Big Data (Google Research) — the Wikilinks Corpus: 40 million total disambiguated mentions within over 10 million web pages [...] The mentions are found by looking for links to Wikipedia pages where the anchor text of the link closely matches the title of the target Wikipedia page. If we think of each page on Wikipedia as an entity (an idea we’ve discussed before), then the anchor text can be thought of as a mention of the corresponding entity.
- Teens Have Always Gone Where Identity Isn’t — if you look back at one of the first dominant social platforms, AOL Instant Messenger, it looks a lot like the pseudonymous Tumblr and Snapchat of today in many respects. You used an avatar that was not your face. Your screenname was not indexed and not personally identifiable (mine was Goober1310).
Video Magnification Code, Copyright MOOC, Open Access Cost-Effectiveness, and SCADA Security (Sucks)
- Eulerian Video Magnification — papers and the MatLab source code for that amazing effect of exaggerating small changes in file. (*This work is patent pending)
- CopyrightX — MOOC on current law of copyright and the ongoing debates concerning how that law should be reformed. Through a combination of pre-recorded lectures, live webcasts, and weekly online seminars, participants in the course will examine and assess the ways in which law seeks to stimulate and regulate creative expression. (via BoingBoing)
- Cost Effectiveness for Open Access Journals — This plot reveals the prestige (Article Influence score) and publication charges for open access journals.
- Results of SANS SCADA Survey 2013 (PDF) — Unfortunately, at this time they seem unable to monitor the PLCs, terminal units and connections to field equipment due to lack of native security in the control systems themselves. (via InfoSecIsland)
Data Classes, Short Text Classification, Movie Lovers, and Mesh Networking for Hardware Hackers
- School of Data — free online courses around data science and visualization.
- libshorttext — classify and analyse short-text of things like titles, questions, sentences, and short messages. MIT-style open source license, Python and C++ source.
- Letterboxd — a site for movie lovers from Kiwi Foo alums. I love people who build experiences to help people express their love of things.
- RadioBlocks and SimpleMesh — mesh networking for Arduino.
EdTech Startups, 3D Portraits, Interactive Storytelling, and Bizarre Consumer Items
- Ed Startups in a Nutshell (Dan Meyer) — I couldn’t agree with Dan more: The Internet is like a round pipe. Lecture videos and machine-scored exercises are like round pegs. They pass easily from one end of the pipe to the other. But there are square and triangular pegs: student-student and teacher-student relationships, arguments, open problems, performance tasks, projects, modeling, and rich assessments. These pegs, right now, do not flow through that round pipe well at all.
- 3D Printed Portraiture: Past, Present, and Future — impressive collection of 3D scans of museum collections of portraiture. Check out his downloadable design files. (via Bruce Sterling)
- Versu — interactive storytelling, with AI and conversation modeling.
- Weird Things Found on Taobao (NSFW) — this is what I never ow my head. (via Beta Knowledge)
SCADA 0-Day, Complexity Course, ToS Tracking, and Custom Manufacturing Prostheses
- Tridium Niagara (Wired) — A critical vulnerability discovered in an industrial control system used widely by the military, hospitals and others would allow attackers to remotely control electronic door locks, lighting systems, elevators, electricity and boiler systems, video surveillance cameras, alarms and other critical building facilities, say two security researchers. cf the SANS SCADA conference.
- Santa Fe Institute Course: Introduction to Complexity — 11 week course on understanding complex systems: dynamics, chaos, fractals, information theory, self-organization, agent-based modeling, and networks. (via BoingBoing)
- Terms of Service Changes — a site that tracks changes to terms of service. (via Andy Baio)
- 3D Printing a Replacement Hand for a 5 Year Old Boy (Ars Technica) — the designs are on Thingiverse. For more, see their blog.
Enlightened Tinkering, In-Browser Tor Proxy, Dark Patterns, and Subjective Data
- Hands on Learning (HuffPo) — Unfortunately, engaged and enlightened tinkering is disappearing from contemporary American childhood. (via BoingBoing)
- FlashProxy (Stanford) — a miniature proxy that runs in a web browser. It checks for clients that need access, then conveys data between them and a Tor relay. [...] If your browser runs JavaScript and has support for WebSockets then while you are viewing this page your browser is a potential proxy available to help censored Internet users.
- Dark Patterns (Slideshare) — User interfaces to trick people. (via Beta Knowledge)
- Bill Gates is Naive: Data Are Not Objective (Math Babe) — examples at the end of biased models/data should be on the wall of everyone analyzing data. (via Karl Fisch)
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