- The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s go back — Facebook gets worse the more you use it. The innovation within Facebook happens within a framework that’s taken as given. This essay questions that frame, well.
- Meet the People Making New Games for Old Hardware — “We’re all fighting for the same goal,” Cobb says. “There’s something artistic, and disciplined, about creating games for machines with limited hardware. You can’t pass off bloat as content, and you can’t drop in a licensed album in place of a hand-crafted digital soundtrack. To make something great you have to work hard, and straight from the heart. That’s what a lot of gamers still wish to see. And we’re happy to provide it for them.”
- DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification — Facebook research into using deep neural networks for face recognition. Our method reaches an accuracy of 97.25% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, reducing the error of the current state of the art by more than 25%, closely approaching human-level performance. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” —Jeff Hammerbacher.
- Helsinki Does Uber for Buses — Helsinki’s Kutsuplus lets you select your pick-up and drop-off locations and times, using a phone app, and then sends out a bus to take you exactly where you need to go.
"games" entries
Four short links: 14 March 2014
Facebook Criticism, New Games, Face Recognition, and Public Uber
Four short links: 25 February 2014
MtGox Go Boom, Flappy Bird, Air Hockey Hack, and Robo Lab
- Bitcoin Markets Down — value of bitcoins plunges as market uncertain after largest bitcoin exchange goes insolvent after losing over 750k bitcoins because they didn’t update their software after a flaw was discovered in the signing of transactions.
- Flappy Bird for the Commodore 64 — the 1980s games platform meets the 2014 game. cf the machine learning hack where the flappy bird learns to play the game successfully.
- Air Hockey Robot — awesome hack.
- Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood — automated lab processing to remove the human error in centrifuging, timing, etc. that added to variability of results.
Four short links: 3 February 2014
Ouroborosification, Kid Curricula, Geeky Furniture, and Data Leakage
- 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.
- Making Makers — kid-tested curricula for kids learning to code, to 3D print, stop motion animation, and more. (via BoingBoing)
- 555 Footstool in the Wild — awesome furniture in the shape of the ever-popular timing chip.
- What a Brand Knows About You When You Log In With Facebook (Twitter) — good lord. (via BoingBoing)
Using Big Data and Game Play to Improve Mental Fitness
Digital tools and data analysis to stay sharp, stay well, and overcome illness
This article was written together with Ellen M. Martin and Melinda Speckmann.
Games have been part of human culture for millennia. It is no surprise that elements of play can be powerful digital tools to grab our attention and keep us on a path to taking care of ourselves and others.
Big data is already behind brain games. The use of big data is becoming increasingly mainstream in health play applications. Once we are drawn in, game play (with big data under the hood) can help us to:
- Stay sharp,
- Stay well, and
- Overcome illness.
Four short links: 30 January 2014
In-Game Economy, AI Ethics, Data Repository, and Regulated Disruption
- $200k of Spaceships Destroyed (The Verge) — More than 2,200 of the game’s players, members of EVE’s largest alliances, came together to shoot each other out of the sky. The resultant damage was valued at more than $200,000 of real-world money. […] Already, the battle has had an impact on the economics and politics of EVE’s universe: as both side scramble to rearm and rebuild, the price of in-game resource tritanium is starting to rise. “This sort of conflict,” Coker said, “is what science fiction warned us about.”
- Google Now Has an AI Ethics Committee (HufPo) — sorry for the HufPo link. One of the requirements of the DeepMind acquisition was that Google agreed to create an AI safety and ethics review board to ensure this technology is developed safely. Page’s First Law of Robotics: A robot may not block an advertisement, nor through inaction, allow an advertisement to come to harm.
- Academic Torrents — a scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant repository for data, with blazing fast download speeds built on BitTorrent.
- Hack Schools Meet California Regulators (Venturebeat) — turns out vocational training is a regulated profession. Regulation meets disruption, annihilate in burst of press releases.
Four short links: 17 December 2013
Graph Compression, Learning Minecraft Coding, Performance Enhancing, and Explained Shell
- WebGraph — a framework for graph compression aimed at studying web graphs. It provides simple ways to manage very large graphs, exploiting modern compression techniques. (via Ben Lorica)
- Learn to Program with Minecraft Plugins — You’ll need to add features to the game itself: learn how to build plugins for your own Minecraft server using the Java programming language. You don’t need to know anything about programming to get started—-this book will teach you everything you need to know! Shameless Christmas stocking bait! (via Greg Borenstein)
- In Search of Perfection, Young Adults Turn to Adderall at Work (Al Jazeera) — “Adderall is just the tip of the iceberg,” Essig said. “There are lots more drugs coming down the pike. The way we set up our cultural model for dealing with psychologically performance-enhancing drugs is a real serious question.”
- Explain Shell — uses parsed manpages to explain a shell commandline. (via Tracy K Teal)
Four short links: 16 December 2013
Data Pipeline, Data Driven Education, Crowdsourced Proofreading, and 3D Printed Shoes
- Suro (Github) — Netflix data pipeline service for large volumes of event data. (via Ben Lorica)
- NIPS Workshop on Data Driven Education — lots of research papers around machine learning, MOOC data, etc.
- Proofist — crowdsourced proofreading game.
- 3D-Printed Shoes (YouTube) — LeWeb talk from founder of the company, Continuum Fashion). (via Brady Forrest)
Four short links: 28 November 2013
Data Tool, Arduino-like Board, Learn to Code via Videogames, and Creative Commons 4.0 Out
-
OpenRefine — (edited: 7 Dec 2013)
Google abandonedGoogle bought Freebase’s GridWorks, turned it into the excellent Refine tool for working with data sets, now picked up and developed by open source community. - Intel’s Arduino-Compatible Board — launched at MakerFaire Rome. (via Wired UK)
- Game Maven — learn to code by writing casual videogames. (via Greg Linden)
- CC 4.0 Out — The 4.0 licenses are extremely well-suited for use by governments and publishers of public sector information and other data, especially for those in the European Union. This is due to the expansion in license scope, which now covers sui generis database rights that exist there and in a handful of other countries.
Four short links: 18 November 2013
Chicago Code, 3D Smithsonian Data, AI Controlling Everything, and Game TCP
- The Virtuous Pipeline of Code (Public Resource) — Chicago partnering with Public Resource to open its legal codes for good. “This is great! What can we do to help?” Bravo Chicago, and everyone else—take note!
- Smithsonian’s 3D Data — models of 21 objects, from a gunboat to the Wright Brothers’ plane, to a wooly mammoth skeleton, to Lincoln’s life masks. I wasn’t able to find a rights statement on the site which explicitly governed the 3D models. (via Smithsonian Magazine)
- Anki’s Robot Cars (Xconomy) — The common characteristics of these future products, in Sofman’s mind: “Relatively simple and elegant hardware; incredibly complicated software; and Web and wireless connectivity to be able to continually expand the experience over time.” (via Slashdot)
- An Empirical Evaluation of TCP Performance in Online Games — We show that because TCP was originally designed for unidirectional and network-limited bulk data transfers, it cannot adapt well to MMORPG traffic. In particular, the window-based congestion control and the fast retransmit algorithm for loss recovery are ineffective. Furthermore, TCP is overkill, as not every game packet needs to be transmitted in a reliably and orderly manner. We also show that the degraded network performance did impact users’ willingness to continue a game.
Four short links: 17 October 2013
GUI Prototyping, Linux Containerisation, Searchable Apple Text, and Infosec Wargames
- Pencil — An open-source GUI prototyping tool that’s available for ALL platforms.
- lmctfy — open source version of Google’s container stack, which provides Linux application containers.
- ASCII WWDC — searchable full-text transcriptions of WWDC sessions.
- Cryptogeddon — an online infosec wargame.