- Australian Filter Scope Creep — The Federal Government has confirmed its financial regulator has started requiring Australian Internet service providers to block websites suspected of providing fraudulent financial opportunities, in a move which appears to also open the door for other government agencies to unilaterally block sites they deem questionable in their own portfolios.
- Embedding Actions in Gmail — after years of benign neglect, it’s good to see Gmail worked on again. We’ve said for years that email’s a fertile ground for doing stuff better, and Google seem to have the religion. (see Send Money with Gmail for more).
- What Keeps Me Up at Night (Matt Webb) — Matt’s building a business around connected devices. Here he explains why the category could be owned by any of the big players. In times like this I remember Howard Aiken’s advice: Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If it is original you will have to ram it down their throats.
- Image Texture Predicts Avian Density and Species Richness (PLOSone) — Surprisingly and interestingly, remotely sensed vegetation structure measures (i.e., image texture) were often better predictors of avian density and species richness than field-measured vegetation structure, and thus show promise as a valuable tool for mapping habitat quality and characterizing biodiversity across broad areas.
ENTRIES TAGGED "government"
Four short links: 16 May 2013
Internet Filter Creep, Innovating in E-Mail/Gmail, Connected Devices Business Strategy, and Ecology Recapitulates Photography
RFP-EZ: Making it easier for small companies to bid on government contracts
RFP-EZ is a small step towards making it easier for new businesses to sell to government.
A few years ago, when I was doing the research that led to my work in open government, I had a conversation with Aneesh Chopra, later the first Federal CTO but at the time, the Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia. I remember him telling me about the frustration of being in government, knowing that you…
What I learned about #debates, social media and being a pundit on Al Jazeera English
Why I'll be turning off the Net and tuning in to the final presidential debate.
Earlier this month, when I was asked by Al Jazeera English if I’d like to be go on live television to analyze the online side of the presidential debates, I didn’t immediately accept. I’d be facing…
Culture transmission is bi-directional
Makers: don't worry about what DARPA will do to you. Think about what you can do to DARPA.
I read this piece in the New York Times the other day and have read it two or three more times since then. It dives into the controversy around DARPA’s involvement in hacker space funding. But frankly, every time I come across this controversy, I’m baffled.
I usually associate this sort of government distrust with Tea Party-led Republicans. The…
What caused New York’s startup boom?
A few early and broad questions in our exploration of NYC's startup community.
Since the crisis of 2008 New York City’s massive financial sector — the city’s richest economic engine, once seen to have unlimited potential for growth — has languished. In the meantime, attention has turned to its nascent startup sector, home to…
Three kinds of big data
Looking ahead at big data's role in enterprise business intelligence, civil engineering, and customer relationship optimization.
In the past couple of years, marketers and pundits have spent a lot of time labeling everything ”big data.” The reasoning goes something like this:
Everything is on the Internet.
The Internet has a lot of data.
Therefore, everything is big data.
When you…
Four short links: 29 June 2012
Personalized Education, Programming Living Data, The Invisible Economy, and State vs Internet
- Personalization (Chris Lehmann) — We should be careful about how we use that term, and we should be very skeptical of how well computerized programs can really personalize for kids. Most of what I see – especially from curriculum and assessment vendors – involves personalization of pace while still maintaining standardization of content. This.
- Unveiling Quadrigram (Near Future Laboratory) — a Visual Programming Environment to gather, shape and share living data. By living data we mean data that are constantly changing and accumulating. They can come from social network, sensor feeds, human activity, surveys, or any kind of operation that produce digital information.
- Tim O’Reilly at MIT Media Lab (Ethan Zuckerman) — a great recap of a Tim talk. There’s an interesting discussion of the unmeasured value created by peer-to-peer activities (such as those made dead simple by the Internet), which is one of the new areas we’re digging into here at O’Reilly.
- The State vs the Internet (David Eaves) — we’ve all seen many ways in which the Internet is undermining the power of nation states. A session at Foo asked how it was going to end (which would give way first?), and this is an excellent recap. It could be that the corporation is actually the entity best positioned to adapt to the internet age. Small enough to leverage networks, big enough to generate a community that is actually loyal and engaged.
Top stories: February 20-24, 2012
Data for the public good, the coming health IT revolution, big data in the cloud.
This week on O'Reilly: Alex Howard examined data's civic role, Dr. Farzad Mostashari discussed health IT and patient empowerment, and Edd Dumbill surveyed big data cloud offerings.
Data for the public good
From healthcare to finance to emergency response, data holds immense potential to help citizens and government.
The explosion of big data, open data and social data offers new opportunities to address humanity's biggest challenges. The open question is no longer if data can be used for the public good, but how.
Four short links: 7 November 2011
City Finances, Low-Power Computers, Future History, and Learner's Mindset
- California and Bust (Vanity Fair) — Michael Lewis digs into city and state finances, and the news ain’t good.
- Tonido Plug 2 — with only watts a day, you could have your own low-cost compute farm that runs off a car battery and a cheap solar panel.
- William Gibson Interview (The Paris Review) — It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.
- Zen and the Art of Making (Phil Torrone) — thoughts on the difference between beginners and experts, and why the beginner’s mindset is intoxicating and addictive.
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