- New Media Challenges: Legal and Policy Considerations for Federal Use of Web 2.0 Technology (Center for American Progress) — report on the issues around Web 2.0 use in Government, which include privacy, security, Public Records Act, advertising, etc. See also It’s Not the Campaign Anymore: How the White House Is Using Web 2.0 Technology So Far from the same group.
- Government Data and the Invisible Hand — Ed Felten has written a fantastic piece on the relationship between data, presentations of the data, and the government departments that produce the data. It is full of powerful recommendations: The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- Fast Modularity Community Structure Inference Algorithm — This algorithm is being widely used in the community of complex network researchers, and was originally designed for the express purpose of analyzing the community structure of extremely large networks (i.e., hundreds of thousand or millions of vertices). The original version worked only with unweighted, undirected networks. I’ve recently posted a version that works on weighted, undirected networks. (via mattb on Delicious)
- First Driver for USB 3.0 — After a year-and-a-half’s worth of work, Intel hacker Sarah Sharp announced that Linux will be the first operating system supporting USB 3.0. (via deusx on Delicious)
"government" entries
Interesting Questions Raised by Iranian Twitter Activism
Development (4:10 PM CST): The State Department has been in contact with Twitter to make sure that the service remained available for protestors in Iran (reuters). Last Friday, Twitter started to digest the Iranian election results, and the tool became a powerful vehicle for protest and coordination for student protestors within Iran and interested parties outside the country.
Four short links: 12 June 2009
Four short links: 8 June 2009
3D Geometry, The Printable Web, Government Internet Fail, and Real World Cloud Computing
- How to Project on 3D Geometry — the fine art (and math) of distorting an image so that it looks undistorted when projected onto a non-flat 3D surface. Confused? See the images below. (via straup on Delicious)
- ZinePal — Create your own printable magazine from any online content. (via warrenellis on Delicious)
- What The Government Doesn’t Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It — Tom Steinberg from MySociety lays it out. As true for US, NZ, and every other country as it is for the UK (for which it was written). Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.” What I like about Tom vs the US’s Gov 2.0 is that Tom puts down philosophy that’s hard to argue with, whereas the US is dangerously close to simply focusing on techniques and that’s subvertible.
- Real World Cloud Computing — summary from a panel of startups who are using EC2. The lock-in is latency. Transfering data within the Amazon services is free. Transfering data to an Amazon competitor: not free.
Four short links: 5 June 2009
Kid Robots, US CTO, SCOTUS CSS, Javascript Infoviz
- Visual Programming Environments for Kids — detailed writeup of the research and coding done by Shone Sadler to build a visual programming environment for robots, so simple that kids can use it. (via steveweiss on Twitter)
- The Nation’s CTO Lays Out His Priorities — it’s still not entirely clear how the CTO and CIO’s roles differ, as both are focusing on open data and “innovation platforms”. CTO explicitly calls out economic growth through technology and innovation, though, which could be promising.
- Redesigning the Government: The US Supreme Court — the Sunlight Foundation offer a redesigned home page to the US Supreme Court, showing how it could be more useful. How long until the government’s CSS is in a git repository where most people with commit access are outside the beltway?
- Javascript Infoviz Toolkit — Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, and more.in this Javascript suite for building data pretties. Higher-level than processing.js. (via chrisblizzard on Twitter)
Four short links: 28 May 2009
Mobile Viruses, Open Data, Twitter Bookmarks, Sexy Geek Skills
- Viral Epidemics Poised to go Mobile — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (author of Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else) modelled mobile phone virus epidemiology for NSF and concluded that (in accordance with experience) no single OS has critical mass for viruses to break-out. I wonder: will Android or iPhone reach that point first? (via ACM TechNews)
- Socrata — formerly “Blist”, the first of what will undoubtedly be many startups “refocusing” attempting to profit from the new US administration’s fondness for Web 2.0. The business model, however, is “we’ll offer your data to citizens in a useful form” and it seems to me that this is a responsibility that Government should embrace rather than outsource. (via Jesse)
- Tag This — tweet @tagthis with a link and keywords to post the link as bookmark in your Delicious/Magnolia account.
- Three Sexy Skills of Geeks — statistics, data munging, and visualization. I’m reading Visualizing Data right now and expect the universe to bury me in bootie before the day is out. “Processing: it’s cheaper than couple’s therapy and you can post pictures of it on the Internet without being fired.” (via mattb on Twitter)
The Myth of Macroinnovation
An idea is making the rounds and appearing in articles like this New York Times piece, and it goes roughly thus: the age of the small inventor is over because to work on stuff that matters requires the largescale coordination of people and materiel that only governments and large corporations can provide. This notion that we’re entering a Golden Age of Macroinnovation is bunkum, I’m happy to report.
Four short links: 25 May 2009
- China is Logging On — blogging 5x more popular in China than in USA, email 1/3 again as popular in USA as China. These figures are per-capita of Internet users, and make eye-opening reading. (via Glyn Moody)
- The Economics of Google (Wired) — the money graf is Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its various business units. Since moving a product’s storage and computation to a new data center is disruptive, engineers often put it off. “I suggested we run an auction similar to what the airlines do when they oversell a flight. They keep offering bigger vouchers until enough customers give up their seats,” Varian says. “In our case, we offer more machines in exchange for moving to new servers. One group might do it for 50 new ones, another for 100, and another won’t move unless we give them 300. So we give them to the lowest bidder—they get their extra capacity, and we get computation shifted to the new data center.”
- Why Washington Doesn’t Get New Media — Things eventually improved, but despite the stunning advances in communications technology, most of federal Washington has still failed to grasp the meaning of Government 2.0. Indeed, much is mired in Government 1.5. Government 1.5? That’s a term of art for the vast virtual ecosystem taking root in Washington that has set up the trappings of 2.0 — the blogs, the Facebook pages, the Twitter accounts — but lacks any intellectual heartbeat. Too many aides in official Washington are setting up blogs and social media pages because they understand that is what they are supposed to do. All the while, many are sweating the possibility that they might actually have to say something substantive or engage the public directly. It is the nature of midlevel know-nothings to grinfuck any idea that would force them to substantially change their behaviour. We incentivize this when we talk about “you must have a blog” (ok, I’ll get comms to write it), or “put up a wiki for this” (ok, but there’ll be no moderation so it’ll be ignorable chaos). Describe the behaviour you want and not a tool that might produce it. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- On the Information Armageddon (Mind Hacks) — Vaughn points out that the much-linked-to New York Magazine article on attention is a crock. I didn’t like it because it was wordy and self-indulgent, Vaughn because it didn’t actually cite any studies other than one which was described incorrectly. History has taught us that we worry about widespread new technology and this is usually expressed in society in terms of its negative impact on our minds and social relationships. If you’re really concerned about cognitive abilities, look after your cardiovascular health (eat well and exercise), cherish your relationships, stay mentally active and experience diverse and interesting things. All of which have been shown to maintain mental function, especially as we age.
Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband): proposal open for votes
I’ve posted a proposal titled Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband) to a forum on open government put up by the White House. I ask this blog’s readers to tell other people who might be interested, and vote up the proposal if you like it. The Open Government Dialog site where this proposal appears is part of the White House’s implementation of the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government that Obama signed on his first day in office. Hundreds of ideas have already been posted. Many are very specific and some look quite worthy, but I think mine stands out for the reasons listed in my justification.
Four short links: 21 May 2009
- Us Now — UK documentary, available streaming or on DVD, about how open government and digital democracy makes sense. It’s good to watch if you’ve not thought about how government could be positively changed by technology, but I don’t think it’s radical enough in the future it describes.
- It’s Gonna Be The Future Soon — great video for the Jonathan Coulton song that’s the Radar theme song, my theme song, and probably works well as an anthem for most of us goofy future-loving freaks. Taken from the DVD of a live show. (via BoingBoing)
- Jetpack — Mozilla Labs’ new extension system. Mozilla Labs is building quite the assemblage of interesting hack tools, and it’s interesting how significantly they’re aimed at the developer and encouraging lots of add-ons and after-market extensions for the browser. I wonder whether this is a deliberate strategy (“community will beat off Chrome!”) or whether it’s a simple consequence of the fact that Mozilla is a developer organisation.
- Sci Bar Camp — Science topics, Palo Alto, 7 July 2009.
Four short links: 14 May 2009
Open Source Ebook Reader, Libraries and Ebooks, Life Lessons, and Government Licenses
- Open Library Book Reader — the page-turning book reader software that the Internet Archive uses is open source. One of the reasons library scanning programs are ineffective is that they try to build new viewing software for each scan-a-bundle-of-books project they get funding for.
- Should Libraries Have eBooks? — blog post from an electronic publisher made nervous by the potential for libraries to lend unlimited “copies” of an electronic work simultaneously. He suggests turning libraries into bookstores, compensating publishers for each loan (interestingly, some of the first circulating libraries were established by publishers and booksellers precisely to have a rental trade). I’m wary of the effort to profit from every use of a work, though. I’d rather see libraries limit simultaneous access to in-copyright materials if there’s no negotiated license opening access to more. Unlike the author, I don’t see this as a situation that justifies DRM, whose poison extends past the term of copyright. (via Paul Reynolds)
-
Lessons Learned from Previous Employment (Adam Shand) — great summary of what he learned in the different jobs he’s had over the years. Sample:
- More than any other single thing, being successful at something means not giving up.
- Everything takes longer than you expect. Lots longer.
- In a volunteer based non-profit people don’t have the shared goal of making money. Instead every single person has their own personal agenda to pursue.
- Unfortunately “dreaming big” is more fun and less work than “doing big”.
- Flickr Creates New License for White House Photos (Wired) — photos from the White House photographer were originally CC-licensed (yay, a step forward) but when it was pointed out that as government-produced information those photos weren’t allowed to be copyright, the White House relicensed as “United States Government Work”. Flickr had to add the category, which differs from “No Known Copyright”, and it’s something that all sharing sites will need to consider if they are going to offer their service to the Government.