"government" entries

Four short links: 29 September 2015

Four short links: 29 September 2015

Indie VC, Robotics Acquisitions, Music Money, and USG Web Standards

  1. My xoxo Talk (Bryce Roberts) — about indie.vc and the experience of trying something good in the investment world. You won’t believe what happened next …
  2. 10 More Robotics Companies Acquired (Robohub) — companies of all types and sizes are finding strategic reasons to acquire robotic ventures to add to their arsenal of products and services because they don’t want to be left behind.
  3. The Past, Present, and Future of the Music Biz — you might not agree with the conclusions, but the numbers are horrifying^W edifying. The U.S. concert industry has nearly tripled since 1999 (when recorded music sales peaked). Yet, what’s typically overlooked by this narrative is that the vast majority of this growth – 83% to be exact – has gone to non-Top 100 touring artists. In 2000, the Top 100 tours (which included ‘NSYNC, Metallica and Snoop Dogg & Dr. Dre) collected nearly 90% of annual concert revenues. Today, that share has fallen to only 44%.
  4. U.S. Web Design Standards — U.S. Digital Service and 18F put together a reusable component library and style guide for U.S. Government apps.
Four short links: 29 July 2015

Four short links: 29 July 2015

Mobile Medical Scanner, Amazon Hardware Showcase, Consistency Challenges, and Govt Alpha Geeks

  1. Cellphone-Based Hand-Held Microplate Reader for Point-of-Care Testing of Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assayswe created a hand-held and cost-effective cellphone-based colorimetric microplate reader that implements a routine hospital test used to identify HIV and other conditions. (via RtoZ)
  2. Amazon Launchpad — a showcase for new hardware startups, who might well be worried about Amazon’s “watch what sells and sell a generic version of it” business model.
  3. Challenges to Adopting Stronger Consistency at Scale (PDF) — It is not obvious that a system that trades stronger consistency for increased latency or reduced availability would be a net benefit to people using Facebook, especially when compared against a weakly consistent system that resolves many inconsistencies with ad hoc mechanisms.
  4. The White House’s Alpha Geeks — Megan Smith for President. I realize now there’s two things we techies should do — one is go where there are lots of us, like MIT or Silicon Valley or whatever, because you can move really fast and do extraordinary things. The other is, go where you’re rare.It’s almost like you’re a frog in boiling water; you don’t really realize how un-diverse it is until you’re in a normal diverse American innovative community like the President’s team. And then you go back and you’re like, wow. You feel, “Man, this industry is so awesome and yet we’re missing all of this talent.”
Four short links: 15 July 2015

Four short links: 15 July 2015

OpeNSAurce, Multimaterial Printing, Functional Javascript, and Outlier Detection

  1. System Integrity Management Platform (Github) — NSA releases security compliance tool for government departments.
  2. 3D-Printed Explosive Jumping Robot Combines Firm and Squishy Parts (IEEE Spectrum) — Different parts of the robot grade over three orders of magnitude from stiff like plastic to squishy like rubber, through the use of nine different layers of 3D printed materials.
  3. Professor Frisby’s Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming — a book on functional programming, using Javascript as the programming language.
  4. Tracking Down Villains — the software and algorithms that Netflix uses to detect outliers in their infrastructure monitoring.
Four short links: 4 March 2015

Four short links: 4 March 2015

Go Microservices, Watch Experience, Multithreading Bugs, and Spooks Ahoy

  1. Microservices in Go — tale of rewriting a Ruby monolith as Go microservices. Interesting, though being delivered at Gophercon India suggests the ending is probably not unhappy.
  2. Watch & Wear (John Cross Neumann) — Android watch as predictor of the value and experience of an Apple Watch. I believe this is the true sweet spot for meaningful wearable experiences. Information that matters to you in the moment, but requires no intervention. Wear actually does this extremely well through Google Now. Traffic, Time to Home, Reminders, Friend’s Birthdays, and Travel Information all work beautifully. […] After some real experience with Wear, I think what is more important is to consider what Apple Watch is missing: Google Services. Google Services are a big component of what can make wearing a tiny screen on your wrist meaningful and personal. I wouldn’t be surprised after the initial wave of apps through the app store if Google Now ends up being the killer app for Apple Watch.
  3. Solving 11 Likely Problems In Your Multithreaded Code (Joe Duffy) — a good breakdown of concurrency problems, including lower-level ones than high-level languages expose. But beware. If you try this [accessing variables with synchronisation] on a misaligned memory location, or a location that isn’t naturally sized, you can encounter a read or write tearing. Tearing occurs because reading or writing such locations actually involves multiple physical memory operations. Concurrent updates can happen in between these, potentially causing the resultant value to be some blend of the before and after values.
  4. Obama Sharply Criticizes China’s Plans for New Technology Rules (Reuters) — In an interview with Reuters, Obama said he was concerned about Beijing’s plans for a far-reaching counterterrorism law that would require technology firms to hand over encryption keys, the passcodes that help protect data, and install security “backdoors” in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access. Goose sauce is NOT gander sauce! NOT! Mmm, delicious spook sauce.
Four short links: 19 February 2015

Four short links: 19 February 2015

Magical Interfaces, Automation Tax, Cyber Manhattan Project, and US Chief Data Scientist

  1. MAS S66: Indistinguishable From… Magic as Interface, Technology, and Tradition — MIT course taught by Greg Borenstein and Dan Novy. Further, magic is one of the central metaphors people use to understand the technology we build. From install wizards to voice commands and background daemons, the cultural tropes of magic permeate user interface design. Understanding the traditions and vocabularies behind these tropes can help us produce interfaces that use magic to empower users rather than merely obscuring their function. With a focus on the creation of functional prototypes and practicing real magical crafts, this class combines theatrical illusion, game design, sleight of hand, machine learning, camouflage, and neuroscience to explore how ideas from ancient magic and modern stage illusion can inform cutting edge technology.
  2. Maybe We Need an Automation Tax (RoboHub) — rather than saying “automation is bad,” move on to “how do we help those displaced by automation to retrain?”.
  3. America’s Cyber-Manhattan Project (Wired) — America already has a computer security Manhattan Project. We’ve had it since at least 2001. Like the original, it has been highly classified, spawned huge technological advances in secret, and drawn some of the best minds in the country. We didn’t recognize it before because the project is not aimed at defense, as advocates hoped. Instead, like the original, America’s cyber Manhattan Project is purely offensive. The difference between policemen and soldiers is that one serves justice and the other merely victory.
  4. White House Names DJ Patil First US Chief Data Scientist (Wired) — There is arguably no one better suited to help the country better embrace the relatively new discipline of data science than Patil.
Four short links: 30 January 2015

Four short links: 30 January 2015

FAA Rules, Sports UAVs, Woodcut Data, and Concurrent Programming

  1. FAA to Regulate UAVs? (Forbes) — and the Executive Order will segment the privacy issues related to drones into two categories — public and private. For public drones (that is, drones purchased with federal dollars), the President’s order will establish a series of privacy and transparency guidelines. See also How ESPN is Shooting the X Games with Drones (Popular Mechanics)—it’s all fun and games until someone puts out their eye with a quadrocopter. The tough part will be keeping within the tight restrictions the FAA gave them. Because drones can’t be flown above a crowd, Calcinari says, “We basically had to build a 500-foot radius around them, where the public can’t go.” The drones will fly over sections of the course that are away from the crowds, where only ESPN production employees will be. That rule is part of why we haven’t seen drones at college football games.
  2. Milestones for SaaS Companies“Getting from $0-1m is impossible. Getting from $1-10m is unlikely. And getting from $10-100m is inevitable.” —Jason Lemkin, ex-CEO of Echosign. The article proposes some significant milestones, and they ring true. Making money is generally hard. The nature of the hard changes with the amount of money you have and the amount you’re trying to make, but if it were easy, then we’d structure our society on something else.
  3. Woodcut Data VisualisationRecently, I learned how to operate a laser cutter. It’s been a whole lot of fun, and I wanted to share my experiences creating woodcut data visualizations using just D3. I love it when data visualisations break out of the glass rectangle.
  4. Why is Concurrent Programming Hard?on the one hand there is not a single concurrency abstraction that fits all problems, and on the other hand the various different abstractions are rarely designed to be used in combination with each other. We are due for a revolution in programming, something to help us make sense of the modern systems made of more moving parts than our feeble grey matter can model and intuit about.
Four short links: 20 January 2015

Four short links: 20 January 2015

Govt IoT, Collective Intelligence, Unknown Excellence, and Questioning Scalability

  1. Matt Webb Joining British Govt Data Service — working on IoT for them.
  2. Reading the Mind in the Eyes or Reading between the Lines? Theory of Mind Predicts Collective Intelligence (PLoS) — theory of mind abilities are a significant determinant of group collective intelligence even when, as in many online groups, the group has extremely limited communication channels. Phone/Skype calls, emails, and chats are all intensely mental activities, trying to picture the person behind the signal.
  3. MIT Faculty Search — two open gigs at MIT, one around climate change and one “undefined.” Great job ad.
  4. Scalability at What Cost?evaluation of these systems, especially in the academic context, is lacking. Folks have gotten all wound-up about scalability, despite the fact that scalability is just a means to an end (performance, capacity). When we actually look at performance, the benefits the scalable systems bring start to look much more sketchy. We’d like that to change.
Four short links: 14 January 2015

Four short links: 14 January 2015

IoT and Govt, Exactly Once, Random Database Subset, and UX Checking

  1. Internet of Things: Blackett Review — the British Government’s review of Internet of Things opportunities around government. Government and others can use expert commissioning to encourage participants in demonstrator programmes to develop standards that facilitate interoperable and secure systems. Government as a large purchaser of IoT systems is going to have a big impact if it buys wisely. (via Matt Webb)
  2. Exactly Once Semantics with Kafka — designing for failure means it’s easier to ensure that things get done than it is to ensure that things get done exactly once.
  3. rdbms-subsetter — open source tool to generate a random sample of rows from a relational database that preserves referential integrity – so long as constraints are defined, all parent rows will exist for child rows. (via 18F)
  4. UXcheck — a browser extension to help you do a quick UX check against Nielsen’s 10 principles.

Business at web speed

A "Coded Business" harnesses feedback loops, optimization, ubiquitous delivery, and other web-centric methods.

Business at web speed: A Coded Business harnesses feedback loops, optimization, ubiquitous delivery and other web-centric methods.

Seven years ago, Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins came to the realization that they both worked within “tribes” that, while ostensibly quite different, were talking about many of the same things. Front-end developers and engineers were figuring out how to make web pages faster and more reliable, and web operations folks were making deployments faster and more resilient.

And so goes the tale of how Velocity came to be — a conference that brought those tribes together and openly shared how to make the web faster and stronger. In those seven years, quite a lot has changed, and many ideas, terms, and technologies have come into being — some directly as a result of Velocity, others were already in the works. DevOps, Chef, Puppet, Continuous Delivery, HTTP Archive — these were the earlier forays. Soon to follow were AWS, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) products, many more monitoring tools, many more CDN vendors, WebPageTest, the explosion of the cloud, Chaos Monkey, mobile everything, Vagrant, Docker, and much, much more.

Out of the fire of Velocity came a New Way of doing things forged in a web-centric world. Along the way, something changed fundamentally about not just tech companies, but companies in general. As we looked around more recently, we realized it wasn’t just about the web and fast pages any more. Read more…