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"fun" entries
Internet of Listeners, Mobile Deep Belief, Crowdsourced Spectrum Data, and Quantum Minecraft
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Jasper Project — an open source platform for developing always-on, voice-controlled applications. Shouting is the new swiping—I eagerly await Gartner touting the Internet-of-things-that-misunderstand-you.
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DeepBeliefSDK — deep neural network library for iOS. (via Pete Warden)
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Microsoft Spectrum Observatory — crowdsourcing spectrum utilisation information. Just open sourced their code.
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qcraft — beginner’s guide to quantum physics in Minecraft. (via Nelson Minar)
Commandline iMessage, Lovely Data, Software Plagiarism Detection, and 3D GIFs
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imsg — use iMessage from the commandline.
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Facebook Data Science Team Posts About Love — I tell people, “this is what you look like to SkyNet.”
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A System for Detecting Software Plagiarism — the research behind the undergraduate bete noir.
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3D GIFs — this is awesome because brain.
Ouroborosification, Kid Curricula, Geeky Furniture, and Data Leakage
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How In-App Purchases Has Destroyed the Games Industry — fantastic before-and-after of a game, showing how it’s hollowed out for in-app-purchase upsell. the problem is that all the future generations of gamers are going to experience this as the default. They are going to grow up in a world, in which people actually think this is what gaming is like. That social engineering and scamming people is an acceptable way of doing business.
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Making Makers — kid-tested curricula for kids learning to code, to 3D print, stop motion animation, and more. (via BoingBoing)
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555 Footstool in the Wild — awesome furniture in the shape of the ever-popular timing chip.
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What a Brand Knows About You When You Log In With Facebook (Twitter) — good lord. (via BoingBoing)
Surveillance Future, DNS Control, 3D Printed Room, and Reality Check
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Meet Jack, or What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data (ACLU) — sham slidedeck which helps laypeople see how our data exhaust can be used
against us to keep us safe.
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PirateBay Moves Domains — different ccTLDs have different policies and operate in different jurisdictions, because ICANN gives them broad discretion to operate the country code domains. However, post-Snowden, governments are turning on the US’s stewardship of critical Internet bodies, so look for governments (i.e., law enforcement) to be meddling a lot more in DNS, IP addresses, routing, and other things which thus far have been (to good effect) fairly neutrally managed.
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3D Printed Room (PopSci) — printed from sand, 11 tons, fully structural, full of the boggle. (via John Hagel)
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Things Real People Don’t Say About Advertising — awesome tumblr, great post. (via Keith Bolland)
Big Diner, Fab Future, Browser Crypto, and STEM Crisis Questioned
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In Search of the Optimal Cheeseburger (Hilary Mason) — playing with NYC menu data. There are 5,247 cheeseburgers you can order in Manhattan. Her Ignite talk from Ignite NYC15.
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James Burke Predicting the Future — spoiler: massive disruption from nano-scale personal fabbing.
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Stanford Javascript Crypto Library — a project by the Stanford Computer Security Lab to build a secure, powerful, fast, small, easy-to-use, cross-browser library for cryptography in Javascript.
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The STEM Crisis is a Myth (IEEE Spectrum) — Every year U.S. schools grant more STEM degrees than there are available jobs. When you factor in H-1B visa holders, existing STEM degree holders, and the like, it’s hard to make a case that there’s a STEM labor shortage.
Git Secrets, Ab Initio Keyboard, Continuous Deployment, and 3D Atomic Models
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More Git and GitHub Secrets (Zach Holman) — wizards tricks. (via Rowan Crawford)
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Building a Keyboard from Scratch (Jesse Vincent) — for the connoisseur.
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Practicing Deployment (Laura Thomson) — you should build the capability for continuous deployment, even if you never intend to continuously deploy.
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3D Printed Atoms (Thingiverse) — customize and 3d-print a Bohr model of any atom.
Sensor Networks, Programming Silliness, Higher Order C, and Meeting Silliness
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Pete Warden on Sensors — We’re all carrying little networked laboratories in our pockets. You see a photo. I see millions of light-sensor readings at an exact coordinate on the earth’s surface with a time resolution down to the millisecond. The future is combining all these signals into new ways of understanding the world, like this real-time stream of atmospheric measurements.
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Quine Relay — This is a Ruby program that generates Scala program that generates Scheme program that generates …(through 50 languages)… REXX program that generates the original Ruby code again.
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Cello — a GNU99 C library which brings higher level programming to C. Interfaces allow for structured design, Duck Typing allows for generic functions, Exceptions control error handling, Constructors/Destructors aid memory management, Syntactic Sugar increases readability.
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The Meeting (John Birmingham) — satirising the Wall Street Journal’s meeting checklist advice.
iOS Package Manager, Designed Satire, API Fragility, and Retweeting WWI
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Alcatraz — package manager for iOS. (via Hacker News)
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Scarfolk Council — clever satire, the concept being a UK town stuck in 1979. Tupperware urns, “put old people down at birth”. The 1979 look is gorgeous. (via BoingBoing)
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Stop Designing Fragile Web APIs — It is possible to design your API in a manner that reduces its fragility and increases its resilience to change. The key is to design your API around its intent. In the SOA world, this is also referred to as business-orientation.
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@life100yearsago (Twitter) — account that tweets out fragments of New Zealand journals and newspapers and similar historic documents, as part of celebrating the surprising and the commonplace during WWI. My favourite so far: “Wizard” stones aeroplane. (via NDF)
Social Science, YAKVS, Open Source Mail, and Tesla Coil and Quadrocopter Fun
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The Effect of Group Attachment and Social Position on Prosocial Behavior (PLoSone) — notable, in my mind, for We conducted lab-in-the-field experiments involving 2,597 members of producer organizations in rural Uganda. cf the recently reported “rich are more selfish than poor” findings, which (like a lot of behavioural economics research) studies Berkeley undergrads who weren’t smart enough to figure out what was being studied.
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elephant — a HTTP key/value store with full-text search and fast queries. Still a work in progress.
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geary (IndieGoGo) — a beautiful modern open-source email client. Found this roughly the same time as elasticinbox open source, reliable, distributed, scalable email store. Open source email action starting?
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The Faraday Copter (YouTube) — Tesla coil and quadrocopter madness. (via Jeff Jonas)
Patenting Preventing Placebos, Simulating Malaria, Pricing Experiments, and Mining Bitcoin
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Patent on Medical Trial Design to Reduce Placebo Effect — drug companies say these failures are happening not because their drugs are ineffective, but because placebos have recently become more effective in clinical trials. […] The whole idea that placebo effect is getting in the way of producing meaningful results is repugnant, I think, to anyone with scientific training. What’s even more repugnant, however, is that Fava’s group didn’t stop with a mere paper in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. They went on to apply for, and obtain, U.S. patents on SPCD. (via Ben Goldacre)
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OpenMalaria (Google Code) — an open source C++ program for simulating malaria epidemiology and the impacts on that epidemiology of interventions against malaria. It is based on microsimulations of Plasmodium falciparum malaria in humans, originally developed for simulating malaria vaccines. (via Victoria Stodden)
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Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know But Can Learn From — compendium of ideas and experiments for pricing.
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Retrominer — mining Bitcoins on a NES. I’m delighted by the conceit, and noticing that Bitcoin is now sufficiently part of the zeitgeist as to feature in playful hacks.