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"geo" entries
Thread Problems, Better Image Search, Open Standards, and GitHub Maps
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Multithreading is Hard — The compiler and the processor both conspire to defeat your threads by moving your code around! Be warned and wary! You will have to do battle with both. Sample code and explanation of WTF the eieio barrier is (hint: nothing to do with Old McDonald’s server farm). (via Erik Michaels-Ober)
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Improving Photo Search (Google Research) — volume of training images, number of CPU cores, and Freebase entities. (via Alex Dong)
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Is Google Dumping Open Standards for Open Wallets? (Matt Asay) — it’s easier to ship than standardise, to innovate than integrate, but the ux of a citizen in the real world is pants. Like blog posts? Log into Facebook to read your friends! (or Google+) Chat is great, but you’d better have one client per corporation your friends hang out on. Nobody woke up this morning asking for features to make web pages only work on one browser. The user experience of isolationism is ugly.
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GitHub Renders GeoJSON — Under the hood we use Leaflet.js to render the geoJSON data, and overlay it on a custom version of MapBox’s street view baselayer — simplified so that your data can really shine. Best of all, the base map uses OpenStreetMap data, so if you find an area to improve, edit away.
Pseudo Memetics, Top Pinch or Bottom Pinch, Innovation Cartography, and Awesome Compilation Hackery
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Anatomy of Two Memes — comparing the spread of Gangnam Style to Harlem Shake. Memes are like currencies: you need to balance accessibility (or ‘money supply’) and inflation. Gangnam Style became globally accessible through top-down mainstream sources (High Popularity), but this gave it high social inflation so it wasn’t valuable to share (Low Shareability). However, scale sustained its long term growth. Harlem Shake was not as easily accessible because it was driven more by small communities (Low Popularity), but for the same reason, being less easily accessible, it remained highly valuable (High Shareability). Lack of scale was what made Harlem Shake growth short-term and eventually killed it prematurely. Caution: contains fauxconomics.
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Handedness (Github) — determine left or right handedness from pinch gesture.
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Innovation Cartography — video of a talk by Richard Jefferson of Cambia’s lens, on the imperative to innovate held at the Skoll World Forum on Social Enterprise. His story of maritime cartography (starts around 5m50s) is awesome.
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Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go — or “crack for Nat” as I like to translate that title.
Search API, Cyberwar=Cyberbollocks, 4k Magic, and Geoparsing
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techu Search Server — Techu exposes a RESTful API for realtime indexing and searching with the Sphinx full-text search engine. We leverage Redis, Nginx and the Python Django framework to make searching easy to handle & flexible.
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In Defence of Digital Freedom — a member of the European Parliament’s piece on the risks to our online freedoms caused by framing computer security into cyberwarfare. Digital freedoms and fundamental rights need to be enforced, and not eroded in the face of vulnerabilities, attacks, and repression. In order to do so, essential and difficult questions on the implementation of the rule of law, historically place-bound by jurisdiction rooted in the nation-state, in the context of a globally connected world, need to be addressed. This is a matter for the EU as a global player, and should involve all of society. (via BoingBoing)
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Inside a 4k Demo — what it’s like to write an amazing demo with only 4k of code. (via Nelson Minar)
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CLAVIN — open source (Apache2) Java library for document geotagging and geoparsing that employs context-based geographic entity resolution. (via Pete Warden)
Know Your HTTP, Digital Exploitation, Insecure Webcams, and CS Courses
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Know Your HTTP Posters (GitHub) — A0-posters about the HTTP protocol.
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Crowdserfing — when a large corp uses crowd-sourced volunteering for its own financial gain, without giving back. It offends my sense of reciprocity as well, but nobody is coerced into using Google Maps or contributing data to it. How do we decide what is “right”?
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Exposed Webcam Viewer — hotels in Russia, lobbies in California, and blinking lights in the darkness from all around the world. (via Hacker News)
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Beauty and Joy of Computing — an introductory computer science curriculum developed at the University of California, Berkeley, intended for non-CS majors at the high school junior through undergraduate freshman level. Uses Snap, a web-based implementation of Scratch.
Mozilla Payments, Firefox Cleans Cookies, Lost: One Web Please Return to Those Who Love It, and 3D from Spaaaaace
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mozpay — a JavaScript API inspired by google.payments.inapp.buy() but modified for things like multiple payment providers and carrier billing. When a web app invokes navigator.mozPay() in Firefox OS, the device shows a secure window with a concise UI. After authenticating, the user can easily charge the payment to her mobile carrier bill or credit card. When completed, the app delivers the product. Repeat purchases are quick and easy.
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Firefox Looks Like it Will Reject Third-Party Cookies (ComputerWorld) — kudos Mozilla! Now we’ll see whether such a cookie policy does deliver a better user experience. Can privacy coexist with a good user experience? Answers on a tweet, please, to @radar.
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How We Lost the Web (Anil Dash) — excellent talk about the decreasing openness and vanishing shared culture of the web. See also David Weinberger’s transcription.
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3D From Space Shuttle Footage? — neat idea! Filming in 3D generally requires two cameras that are separated laterally, to create the parallax effected needed for stereoscopic vision. Fortunately, videos shot from Earth orbit can be converted to 3D without a second camera, because the camera is constantly in motion.
Island Traps, Apolitical Technology, 3D Printing Patent Suits, and Disk-Based Graph Tool
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Trap Island — island on most maps doesn’t exist.
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Why I Work on Non-Partisan Tech (MySociety) — excellent essay. Obama won using big technology, but imagine if that effort, money, and technique were used to make things that were useful to the country. Political technology is not gov2.0.
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3D Printing Patent Suits (MSNBC) — notable not just for incumbents keeping out low-cost competitors with patents, but also (as BoingBoing observed) Many of the key patents in 3D printing start expiring in 2013, and will continue to lapse through ’14 and ’15. Expect a big bang of 3D printer innovation, and massive price-drops, in the years to come. (via BoingBoing)
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GraphChi — can run very large graph computations on just a single machine, by using a novel algorithm for processing the graph from disk (SSD or hard drive). Programs for GraphChi are written in the vertex-centric model, proposed by GraphLab and Google’s Pregel. GraphChi runs vertex-centric programs asynchronously (i.e changes written to edges are immediately visible to subsequent computation), and in parallel. GraphChi also supports streaming graph updates and removal of edges from the graph.
Vannevar Bush, Topic Transparency, Ancient Maps, and Concussion Sensors
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As We May Think (Vannevar Bush) — incredibly prescient piece he wrote for The Atlantic in 1945.
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Transparency and Topic Models (YouTube) — a talk from DataGotham 2012, by Hanna Wallach. She uses latent Dirichlet allocation topic models to mine text data in declassified documents where the metadata are useless. She’s working on predicting classification durations (AWESOME!). (via Matt Biddulph)
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Slippy Map of the Ancient World — this. is. so. cool!
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Technology in the NFL — X2IMPACT’s Concussion Management System (CMS) is a great example of this trend. CMS, when combined with a digital mouth guard, also made by X2, enables coaches to see head impact data in real-time and asses concussions through monitoring the accelerometers in a players mouth guard. That data helps teams to decide whether to keep a player on the field or take them off for their own safety. Insert referee joke here.
LIDAR for Mapping, Homebrew CoverFlow, Browser Exploitation, and Dependency Injection
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Wearable LIDAR Sensors for Mapping (BBC) — made at MIT from commodity hardware, The system is still a prototype, but when tested in closed hallways without any Global Positioning System (GPS) signal, it was able to precisely map the environment as the user was moving through it. (via Andrew Turner)
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Coverflow (Github) — an iPhone project implementing Coverflow using iOS 6 UICollectionViews and a custom UICollectionViewLayout […] I think the interpolation technique I use is rather neat and allows you to easily adjust the layout and behavior of the layout. (via Jonathan Wight)
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BEEF Project — The Browser Exploitation Framework. It is a penetration testing tool that focuses on the web browser.
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Dagger (Github) — A fast dependency injector for Android and Java. (via Chris Aniszczyk)
Rapture of the Nerds, Amazon Maps API, 3D Printer Queues, and the New Aesthetic
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The Rapture of the Nerds (Charlie Stoss, Cory Doctorow) — available for download and purchase under a CC-A-NC-ND license.
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Amazon Maps API — if there is an API layer of general use to developers, Amazon will build it. They want to be the infrastructure for the web. Tim identified “the Internet Operating System”, and Amazon figured out how to put a pricetag on every syscall.
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Hoektronics — open source 3d printer queue management. (via Daniel Suarez)
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The Machine Gaze (Will Wiles) — Converging, leapfrogging technologies evoke new emotional responses within us, responses that do not yet have names. (via James Bridle)
NeoVictorian Computing, Participatory Budgeting, Micro Thrusters, and Geopositioning Accuracy
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NeoVictorian Computing (Mark Bernstein) — read this! I think we all woke up one day to find ourselves living in the software factory. The floor is hard, from time to time it gets very cold at night, and they say the factory is going to close and move somewhere else. […] The Arts & Crafts movement failed in consumer goods, but it could succeed in software. (via James Governor)
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Participatory Budgeting — research shows participation is more effective than penalties in taxation compliance. Participation is more effective than penalties in almost everything.
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MIT-Developed Microthrusters — a flat, compact square — much like a computer chip — covered with 500 microscopic tips that, when stimulated with voltage, emit tiny beams of ions. Together, the array of spiky tips creates a small puff of charged particles that can help propel a shoebox-sized satellite forward. You say satellite, but it’s only a matter of time until this powers a DIY RC rocket with a camera payload. (via Hacker News)
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Yelp Checkins to Measure Geopositioning Accuracy Across Phones — By analyzing millions of data points, we can easily see how, on average, different platforms perform. iPhones consistently have the most accurate positioning, with a fairly small accuracy radius. Android phones are often inaccurate, but reliably reported that inaccuracy. And finally, iPods using Wi-Fi positioning proved the least accurate and usually reported incorrect accuracy radii.