- Government is an Elephant (Public Strategist) — if Government is to be a platform, it will end up competing with the members of its ecosystems (the same way Apple’s Dashboard competed with Konfabulator, and Google’s MyMaps competed with Platial). If you think people squawk when a company competes, just wait until the competition is taxpayer-funded ….
- Recordings from NoSQL Live Boston — also available in podcasts.
- Modeling Scale Usage Heterogeneity the Bayesian Way — people use 1-5 scales in different ways (some cluster around the middle, some choose extremes, etc.). This shows how to identify the types of users, compensate for their interpretation of the scale, and how it leads to more accurate results.
- Building a Better Teacher — fascinating discussion about classroom management that applies to parenting, training, leading a meeting, and many other activities that take place outside of the school classroom. (via Mind Hacks)
"events" entries
Four short links: 16 March 2010
Platform Games, NoSQL Conf, Ratings, and How to Teach
Four short links: 30 October 2009
Three Minute Theses, Google Wave RPGs, Public Metadata, and The Finitely-Zoomable Natural World
- The3is In Three — PhD students must explain their thesis topic in three minutes and one Powerpoint slide. Winner had written on the last words of Shakespearean characters as they met unlikely ends. No video alas, but what a great idea for an Ignite! (via sciblogs)
- Google Wave: We Came, We Saw, We Played D&D (ArsTechnica) — gamers using Wave to play RPGs. This can’t be the killer app, however, because it is not pornographic. (via BoingBoing)
- Metadata is Public Record (ArsTechnica) — Arizone State Supreme Court rules that metadata on the public record is itself in the public record. The test case was a cop who suspected his performance reports had been created when he asked for them and then backdated. His employer had argued the inode info wasn’t part of the public record, even though his report was. Sanity prevailed. (via glynmoody on Twitter)
- Cell Size and Scale — sweet zoomable interface to show the different relationships in size between everything from Times Regular 12pt to a Carbon atom (via salt, E. coli, hemoglobin, etc.). (via Tom Carden on Delicious)
Four short links: 14 September 2009
NoSQL, Gov 2.0 Videos, Linux Conf, Geodata Grump
- WTF Is A Supercolumn? — Cassandra is a NoSQL database, a triplestore that scales superwell. Because it’s not the usual relational thing we’re accustomed to, the language can be a barrier to learning: ColumnFamily, SuperColumns, and more. This post explains what’s what, with examples. (via joshua on Delicious)
- Gov 2.0 Summit Videos — When I grow up, I want to be Clay Shirky, Tom Steinberg, and Carl Malamud. Some videos are up, others coming up soon–stay tuned for Carl’s, which received the only standing O of the show. [updated with link to Carl’s talk when it was released]
- linux.conf.au Schedule Posted — bring the thunda down unda in 2010. The schedule was just released.
- Transport for London Does Not Like the Ordnance Survey — an Official Information Request yielded the Transport for London response to an Ordnance Survey “strategy consultation”. The OS should appoint an independent body to review their licence documents and pay them based on the number of words deleted. Sound advice too–OS have crippled the geospatial industry in the UK by charging for their (admittedly finely-detailed) data. (via mattb on delicious)
Four short links: 10 August 2009
Propaganda, Computer Science, Web Science, CS History
- The Propaganda Newspapers — London councils increasingly providing their own newspapers, masquerading as mass-market popular appeal newspapers but without anything critical of the council that produces it. This is an evolutionary dead-end for reinventing newspapers, and is why the non-profit/trust structure works so well.
- Time for Computer Science to Grow Up — publish in journals so conferences can be community events. I’ve seen academics at Sci Foo look around at the unconference structure, or lightning talks, and say “why can’t my normal conferences be like this?!”, and not just in computer science too. Science conferences need a heart transplant. (via David Pennock)
- Science Online 2010 — conference on science and the Web. Our goal is to bring together scientists, physicians, patients, educators, students, publishers, editors, bloggers, journalists, writers, web developers, programmers and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for doing science, publishing science, teaching science, and promoting the public understanding of science. (via kubke on Twitter)
- E.W. Dijkstra Archive — a collection of over 1,000 manuscripts that EWD sent around during his career. EWD 1036, “On the cruelty of really teaching computing science”. “From a bit to a few hundred megabytes, from a microsecond to a half an hour of computing confronts us with completely baffling ratio of 109” (via S. Lott)
Four short links: 27 July 2009
- Ignite OSCON — 56m of video from Ignite OSCON. They’re all great, but Dan Meyer remains the highlight for me.
- gheat — a maptile server in Python, delivering heatmaps to be superimposed on Google Maps. Handy for visualization fiends.
- CaDNAno — open source software for design of 3-dimensional DNA origami. One of George Church’s projects. I love the combination of math, biology, and whimsy in open-source giftwrap. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- CommentPress — an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. I’m taking a greater interest in tools that channel and focus participation rather than simply providing “edit this page”. (via gov2.net.au’s issues paper)
Four short links: 17 July 2009
- NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration in Excel — Excel plugin for analysing graph data within Excel. Visualization and data wizardry come to the corporates who live in Excel.
- Managing the Environmental Crisis — a comment by Edwin Winge: “Public involvement does offer long-range benefits, the most pragmatic of which is that it results in better decisions. Park Service managers have discovered through experience that when they are willing to modify their professional judgements by considering ideas and opinions (values) of concerned citizens, the final decision that results is not only more acceptable to the public, it is also more satisfying to the Service.” A banner quote for Gov 2.0, from the father of O’Reilly’s Sara Winge. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- Dopplr Social Atlas for iPhone — an iPhone app that gives you the recommendations by Dopplr users for places to eat, things to do, places to stay around the world.
- Microformats Dev Camp — July 25-6 (weekend following OSCON), in San Francisco at the Automattic offices. (via Tantek)
Four short links: 16 July 2009
Transparency Camp, Wasted Time, Advertising Hypocrisy, Maker Skills
- Transparency Camp West — a few more slots left for Google-hosted Aug 8 and 9 Bar Camp on open government.
- Meeting Ticker — count the cost of a meeting in real time, just enter the number of people, the time it started, and the average salary. (via make on Twitter)
- More Creative Shops Are Commercializing Their Own Product Lines — Tellingly, ad companies don’t run ads for their products. “[W]e haven’t bought a single ad in support of any of our brands. Not one. Why would we? You can do so much if you know what you’re doing with product placement, sponsorship, digital PR. It’s that whole “I haven’t got any money, so I’ll have to think.” It makes you much better at grinding out media without paying. (via someone on Twitter, apologies for forgetting whom)
- 18 Essential Skills for a Maker — 13. Strip, splice, and terminate wire- Trickier than it sounds. You should be able to splice wire using a crimp splice, a wire nut, and heat shrink + solder (note: electrical tape is NOT on that list). You should know how to use a wire stripper to strip stranded wire without cutting more than one or two strands. You should be able to attach a wire to your project in such a way that it will still be attached in two weeks, two months, or two years. (via Makezine)
Four short links: 13 July 2009
- IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit — methodology and toolkit for inspiring new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need. Full PDF of manual and cards available for free download.
- Bentham and the Privacy of the Grave — [M]uch of what Bentham meant to address in the context of his Panoptic structures we now take for granted. In Bentham’s lifetime, Parliamentary deliberations were confidential. Bentham’s arguments forced them into the sunlight. Legal decisions and statute books were accessible only to lawyers and judges. Bentham’s arguments led to codification of the law, and increasingly accessible legal rules. Bentham was far ahead of his time — the first modern information theorist. The idea that all actions of government would be presumptively available for public review did not become part of U.S. law until the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1967. As we speak, it appears the English parliament is only now learning Bentham’s message about publicity. Bentham was an early transparency advocate, economist, and character. I first read of him in the excellent A Brief History of Economics: Artful Approaches to the Dismal Science. (via carlmalamud on Twitter)
- Curated Twitter Feed for Projecting Over Speakers — Guardian developed it for their “Activate Summit” and it’s since been used in two other events. They’ve open sourced it.
- Android Market Problems — take heed, all ye who would build “the iPhone App Store of …”, it’s not easy to deliver a great customer experience.
Ignite! comes to San Jose June 22nd – Submit your talks now!
Ignite! is coming to San Jose on Monday June 22, 2009 at 8:00 pm, attached to the Velocity Conference. Admission is free, open to all, and there will be a cash bar. The deadline for talks is May 11th, so submit your talks now! As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15…
Importance of Innovation in Finance & BarCampBank
“Progress is not the mere correction of evils. Progress is the constant replacing of the best there is with something still better.” -Edward Filene Two years ago, when we were organizing the first BarCampBank in the US, many people found it hard to believe that banks & credit unions could a place for meaningful grassroots innovation. Even crazier was…