"feedback" entries

Four short links: 3 November 2011

Four short links: 3 November 2011

Getting Feedback, Colour Design, Discovering Musicians, Weather Prediction App

  1. Feedback Without Frustration (YouTube) — Scott Berkun at the HIVE conference talks about how feedback fails, and how to get it successfully. He is so good.
  2. Americhrome — history of the official palette of the United States of America.
  3. Discovering Talented Musicians with Musical Analysis (Google Research blgo) — very clever, they do acoustical analysis and then train up a machine learning engine by asking humans to rate some tracks. Then they set it loose on YouTube and it finds people who are good but not yet popular. My favourite: I’ll Follow You Into The Dark by a gentleman with a wonderful voice.
  4. Dark Sky (Kickstarter) — hyperlocal hyper-realtime weather prediction. Uses radar imagery to figure out what’s going on around you, then tells you what the weather will be like for the next 30-60 minutes. Clever use of data plus software.
Four short links: 14 July 2011

Four short links: 14 July 2011

Microchip Archaeology, OSM Map Library, Feedback Loops for Public Expenditure, and Mind-reading Big Data

  1. Digging into Technology’s Past — stories of the amazing work behind the visual 6502 project and how they reconstructed and simulated the legendary 6502 chip. To analyze and then preserve the 6502, James treated it like the site of an excavation. First, he needed to expose the actual chip by removing its packaging of essentially “billiard-ball plastic.” He eroded the casing by squirting it with very hot, concentrated sulfuric acid. After cleaning the chip with an ultrasonic cleaner—much like what’s used for dentures or contact lenses—he could see its top layer.
  2. Leaflet — BSD-licensed lightweight Javascript library for interactive maps, using the Open Street Map.
  3. Too Many Public Works Built on Rosy Scenarios (Bloomberg) — a feedback loop with real data being built to improve accuracy estimating infrastructure project costs. He would like to see better incentives — punishment for errors, rewards for accuracy — combined with a requirement that forecasts not only consider the expected characteristics of the specific project but, once that calculation is made, adjust the estimate based on an “outside view,” reflecting the cost overruns of similar projects. That way, the “unexpected” problems that happen over and over again would be taken into consideration.
    Such scrutiny would, of course, make some projects look much less appealing — which is exactly what has happened in the U.K., where “reference-class forecasting” is now required. “The government stopped a number of projects dead in their tracks when they saw the forecasts,” Flyvbjerg says. “This had never happened before.”
  4. Neurovigil Gets Cash Injection To Read Your Mind (FastCompany) — “an anonymous American industrialist and technology visionary” put tens of millions into this company, which has hardware to gather mineable data. iBrain promises to open a huge pipeline of data with its powerful but simple brain-reading tech, which is gaining traction thanks to technological advances. But the other half of the potentailly lucrative equation is the ability to analyze the trove of data coming from iBrain. And that’s where NeuroVigil’s SPEARS algorithm enters the picture. Not only is the company simplifying collection of brain data with a device that can be relatively comfortably worn during all sorts of tasks–sleeping, driving, watching advertising–but the combination of iBrain and SPEARS multiplies the efficiency of data analysis. (via Vaughan Bell)
Four short links: 7 July 2011

Four short links: 7 July 2011

C64 Presales, Coding Lessons Learned, Feedback Loops, and Continuous Integration

  1. Commodore 64 PC — gorgeous retro look with fairly zippy modern internals. (via Rob Passarella)
  2. Designing Github for Mac — a retrospective from the author of the excellent Mac client for github. He talks about what he learned and its origins, design, and development. Remember web development in 2004? When you had to create pixel-perfect comps because every element on screen was an image? That’s what developing for Cocoa is. Drawing in code is slow and painful. Images are easier to work with and result in more performant code. Remember these days? This meant my Photoshop files had to be a lot more fleshed out than I’ve been accustomed to in recent years. I usually get about 80% complete in Photoshop (using tons of screenshotting & layer flattening), then jump into code and tweak to completion. But with Cocoa, I ended up fleshing out that last 20% in Photoshop.
  3. Feedback Loops (Wired) — covers startups and products that use feedback loops to help us change our behaviour. The best sort of delivery device “isn’t cognitively loading at all,” he says. “It uses colors, patterns, angles, speed—visual cues that don’t distract us but remind us.” This creates what Rose calls “enchantment.” Enchanted objects, he says, don’t register as gadgets or even as technology at all, but rather as friendly tools that beguile us into action. In short, they’re magical. (via Joshua Porter)
  4. continuous.io — hosted continuous integration. (via Jacob Kaplan-Moss)

Computers are looking back at us

The mouse's days are numbered. Researchers have developed laptops controlled by eye movement.

Tobii Technology is testing prototype laptops that use eye-tracking technology that replaces a mouse — and they think it might just be ready for mass-market consumption.

Four short links: 5 January 2011

Four short links: 5 January 2011

Cloud Checklist, Feedback Loops, Coverage Testing, and Un-national Services

  1. Multi-tenant SaaS Checklist — if you’re used to building single-site web apps, this is a simple overview of the differences when building multi-tenanted web apps. Nominally about Java, ending with a plug for its author’s product, but ignore all that and it’s still useful. (via Abhishek Tiwari on Twitter)
  2. Angel Investing: My First Three Years (Paul Buchheit) — interesting to see how it stacks up for him. What caught my eye was The more great YC companies there are, the more reasons there are for other smart founders to join YC–the clever feedback loop in YC, where graduates help the newbies, builds its quality and increases its first-mover advantage year after year. (via Hacker News)
  3. Coverstory — reports on coverage of unit tests in Xcode. (via Noah Gift on Delicious)
  4. A Musing About 2011 and an Un-National Generation (JP Rangaswami) — The emerging generations want to use services independent of location of “origin” and location of “delivery”. Attempts to create artificial scarcity (by holding on to dinosaur constructs like physical-location-driven identity) are being responded to by a whole slew of spoofing and anonymisation tools; as the law becomes more of an ass in this context, you can be sure that the tools will get better. Living in a country other than America brings this home.

Second "Open Feedback" Title Now Online

Over on the O'Reilly Labs blog, Keith Fahlgren talks about the latest title to go live in our Open Feedback Publishing System, which gives authors and readers a way to discuss a book while it's being written. The latest book, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, also features a very nice upgrade to the system's CSS (its look-and-feel)….