- Toxic Behaviour — only 5% of toxic behavior comes from toxic people; 77% of it comes from people who are usually good.
- More Encryption Is Not The Solution (Poul-Henning Kamp) — To an intelligence agency, a well-thought-out weakness can easily be worth a cover identity and five years of salary to a top-notch programmer. Anybody who puts in five good years on an open source project can get away with inserting a patch that “on further inspection might not be optimal.”
- On Location With Foursquare (Anil Dash) — Foursquare switched from primarily being concerned with the game-based rewards around engagement and the recording of people’s whereabouts to a broader mission that builds on that base to be about location as a core capability of the Internet.
- The Flipped Flipped Classroom — the “exploration first” model is a better way to learn. You cannot have the answers before you think of the questions. (via Karl Fisch)
"foursquare" entries
Four short links: 7 August 2013
Toxic Behaviour, Encryption Deception, Foursquare Strategy, and Problem-First Learning
Four short links: 22 November 2012
Urine Checkins, News Summaries, Zombie Ideas, and Scanner Plans
- Mark Your Territory — Urine integration for Foursquare. (via Beta Knowledge)
- TL;DR — news summaries. Finally.
- Zombie Ideas and Online Instruction — The repeated return of mistaken ideas captures well my experiences with technologies in schools and what I have researched over decades. The zombie idea that is rapidly being converted into policies that in the past have been “refuted with evidence but refuse to die” is: new technologies can cure K-12 and higher education problems of teaching and learning. The most recent incarnation of this revolving-door idea is widespread access to online instruction in K-12 education cyber-charter schools, blended schools where online instruction occurs for a few hours a day, and mandated courses that children and youth have to take.
- Google Open Sources Their Book Scanner — hardware designs for their clever system for high-throughput non-destructive book-scanning. (via Hackaday)
Commerce Weekly: PayPal's Here service takes on Square
PayPal launches a card reader, AmEx teams with Twitter, and the smartphone tipping point is mere months away.
PayPal introduces its own credit card reader, AmEx asks you to tweet it out, and Asymco visualizes the smartphone market. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
Softly buzzing phones could yield better augmented reality
Foursquare's Dennis Crowley on subtle forms of augmented reality.
Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, says subtle interactions — like a buzzing phone — could lead to better augmented reality experiences than those provided through cameras and screens.
Four short links: 26 October 2010
NoSQL Experience, Connected Future, Hacktivism, and Mobile UI Guidelines
- 12 Months with MongoDB (Worknik) — every type of retrieval got faster than their old MySQL store, and there are some other benefits too. They note that the admin tools aren’t really there for MongoDB, so “there is a blurry hand-off between IT Ops and Engineering.” (via Hacker News)
- Dawn of a New Day — Ray Ozzie’s farewell note to Microsoft. Clear definition of the challenges to come: At first blush, this world of continuous services and connected devices doesn’t seem very different than today. But those who build, deploy and manage today’s websites understand viscerally that fielding a truly continuous service is incredibly difficult and is only achieved by the most sophisticated high-scale consumer websites. And those who build and deploy application fabrics targeting connected devices understand how challenging it can be to simply & reliably just ‘sync’ or ‘stream’. To achieve these seemingly simple objectives will require dramatic innovation in human interface, hardware, software and services. (via Tim O’Reilly on Twitter)
- A Civic Hacktivism Abecedary — good ideas matched with exquisite quotes and language. My favourite: Kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. (via Francis Irving on Twitter)
- UI Guidelines for Mobile and Web Programming — collection of pointers to official UI guidelines from Nokia, Apple, Microsoft, MeeGo, and more.
Reality has a gaming layer
Kevin Slavin sees a world where games shape life and life shapes games.
Kevin Slavin, managing director of Area/Code and a speaker at Web 2.0 Expo New York, has worked at the the intersection of games and reality for nearly a decade. In this interview, Slavin explores the impact of mobile apps and the unexpected ways games shape our lives.
Four short links: 18 January 2010
Google Wave Uses, Open Data Reddit, Crypto Flaw, and Foursquare for Good
- On How Google Wave Surprisingly Changed My Life — mandated in his small company that non-critical emails be turned into waves instead. Saw: more resolutions to arguments, less rehash of old territory, conversation gained structure and could be referred to afterwards, remote employees able to participate even when timezones prevented real-time. I’ve been looking for the use case that says “this is what Google Wave is really good for”, and this is a great start. Note: small # of people, and in a company, so critical mass issue easily overcome.
- Open Data and APIs on Reddit — a new subreddit created just for Open Data and APIs.
- Smart Meter Crypto Flaw Worse Than Thought — poor seeding of the pseudorandom number generator in various chipsets, including those heavily used in embedded networked applications such as smart meters, means those devices are trivially insecure. (via Hacker News)
- Foursquare is Changing Our World (Mashable) — Foursquare was perhaps the first to change our day and night life experiences into a social competition to essentially answer the question, “who has the most interesting life?” In fact, one key side effect of playing the game is that it inspires users to lead more active and interesting social lives. While this may all sound superficial and silly, the implications of social location gaming are quite significant. One of the many reasons that O’Reilly invested in Foursquare–glad to see someone noticing. (via timo on Delicious)