- Cost-Effectiveness of Internet-Based Self-Management Compared with Usual Care in Asthma (PLoSone) — Internet-based self-management of asthma can be as effective as current asthma care and costs are similar.
- Apache Lucy — full-text search engine library written in C and targeted at dynamic languages. It is a “loose C” port of Apache Lucene™, a search engine library for Java.
- The Near Future of Citizen Science (Fiona Romeo) — near future of science is all about honing the division of labour between professionals, amateurs and bots. See Bryce’s bionic software riff. (via Matt Jones)
- Microsoft’s Patent Claims Against Android (Groklaw) — behold, citizen, the formidable might of Microsoft’s patents and how they justify a royalty from every Android device equal to that which you would owe if you built a Windows Mobile device: These Microsoft patents can be divided into several basic categories: (1) the ‘372 and ‘780 patents relate to web browsers; (2) the ‘551 and ‘233 patents relate to electronic document annotation and highlighting; (3) the ‘522 patent relates to resources provided by operating systems; (4) the ‘517 and ‘352 patents deal with compatibility with file names once employed by old, unused, and outmoded operating systems; (5) the ‘536 and ‘853 patents relate to simulating mouse inputs using non-mouse devices; and (6) the ‘913 patent relates to storing input/output access factors in a shared data structure. A shabby display of patent menacing.
"Internet" entries
An open response to Sen. Blumenthal on Protect IP and SOPA
Almost anything can be claimed as a copyright violation if you don't have to defend the claim.
SOPA and Protect IP are proposing remedies to copyright violation that never come under the scrutiny of the legal system.
Four short links: 15 November 2011
Internet Asthma Care, C Fulltext, Citizen Science, and Mozilla
You share something, you get something back: How the web is redefining privacy
O'Reilly Media CIO, Jonathan Reichental, speaks at TEDx in Chicago.
Combining a mix of freely available public domain information and our own sharing behaviors on the web clearly suggests that we must redefine our view of privacy.
Four short links: 19 September 2011
The Changing Internet, Python Data Analysis, Society of Mind, and Gaming Proteins
- 1996 vs 2011 Infographic from Online University (Evolving Newsroom) — “AOL and Yahoo! may be the butt of jokes for young people, but both are stronger than ever in the Internet’s Top 10”. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
- Pandas — open source Python package for data analysis, fast and powerful. (via Joshua Schachter)
- The Society of Mind — MIT open courseware for the classic Marvin Minsky theory that explains the mind as a collection of simpler processes. The subject treats such aspects of thinking as vision, language, learning, reasoning, memory, consciousness, ideals, emotions, and personality. Ideas incorporate psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science to resolve theoretical issues such as whole vs. parts, structural vs. functional descriptions, declarative vs. procedural representations, symbolic vs. connectionist models, and logical vs. common-sense theories of learning. (via Maria Popover)
- Gamers Solve Problem in AIDS Research That Puzzled Scientists for Years (Ed Yong) — researchers put a key protein from an HIV-related virus onto the Foldit game. If we knew where the halves joined together, we could create drugs that prevented them from uniting. But until now, scientists have only been able to discern the structure of the two halves together. They have spent more than ten years trying to solve structure of a single isolated half, without any success. The Foldit players had no such problems. They came up with several answers, one of which was almost close to perfect. In a few days, Khatib had refined their solution to deduce the protein’s final structure, and he has already spotted features that could make attractive targets for new drugs. Foldit is a game where players compete to find the best shape for a protein, but it’s capable of being played by anyone–barely an eighth of players work in science.
Putting innovation and tech to work against breast cancer
A new health challenge is taking on breast cancer.
A $100-million challenge will pursue new approaches to fighting breast cancer through data, technology and innovation.
The Great Reset: Why tomorrow may not be better than today
Hard truths about our values, the economy and the outlook for the future.
Mark Sigal says we're entering a period where the promise of a better tomorrow is no longer a generational expectation and our sense of a (mostly) fair and balanced system is being drowned by an elite class.
Four short links: 9 June 2011
MongoDB Subpessimalization, Anti-Intellectualism, Teen Internet Use, Android Internals
- Optimizing MongoDB — shorter field names, barely hundreds of ops/s when not in RAM, updates hold a lock while they fetch the original from disk … it’s a pretty grim story. (via Artur Bergman)
- Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism? — focus is absolutely necessary if we are to gain knowledge. We will be ignoramuses indeed, if we merely flow along with the digital current and do not take the time to read extended, difficult texts. (via Sacha Judd)
- Trend Data for Teens (Pew Internet and American Life Project) — one in six American teens have used the Internet to look for information online about a health topic that’s hard to talk about, like drug use, sexual health, or depression.
- The Guts of Android (Linux Weekly News) — technical but high-level explanation of the components of an Android system and how they compare to those of a typical Linux system.
Four short links: 6 June 2011
Paper App, Retro Net Simulation, Games Creator, Beginning Large-Scale Machine Learning
- Turning Receipts into Paper Apps (BERG London) — I love the idea of the modern web app sensibility bleeding back into the world, the same way classic offline design has informed online.
- Telehack — an amazing interactive reconstruction of the early net, part nostalgia part game part simulation. Check out the README for more details. (via Andy Baio)
- Stencyl — free Flash games creation tool. Brilliant because they’re creating and owning a corresponding market for in-game assets (icons, sounds, etc.). (via Andy Baio)
- Introductory Machine Learning Resources (Quora) — collection of pointers for beginners. (via Joshua Schachter)
Four short links: 30 May 2011
Tables to Charts, Crowdsourcing Incentives, Domain Boondoggles, and Conquering Complexity
- Chartify — jQuery plugin to create Google charts from HTML tables. (via Rasmus Sellberg)
- Designing Incentives for Crowdsourcing Workers (Crowdflower) — In a tough turn for the sociologists and psychologists, none of the purely social/psychological treatments had any significant effects at all.
- The gTLD Boondoggle — ICANN promised back in 1998 that they would bring the world lots of new domains. So far they haven’t, the world has not come to an end, and the Internet has not collapsed. The absence of demand for new TLDs from actual users (as opposed to domain promoters and the occasional astroturf) is deafening. What we do see is a lot of concern that there will be more mistakes like .XXX, and pressure from governments both via the GAC and directly to ensure it doesn’t happen again. It’s a bugger when you go hunting for a new product’s domain name and realize “all the good ones are taken”, but that’s an argument against domain squatters/speculators not an argument for opening up new top-level-domain vistas.
- Atul Gawande’s Medical School Commencement Address (New Yorker) — every lesson in here about healthcare is just as applicable to software development. Read it. (via Courtney Johnston)
Four short links: 26 May 2011
Fibre Horse, Forced Gold Farming, Google Correlate, Internet GDP
- Draft Horses Bring Fibre to Remote Locations — I love the conjunction of old and new, as draft horses prove the best way to lay fibre in remote Vermont. (via David Isenberg)
- Chinese Political Prisoners Gold-Farming (Guardian) — “Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” Liu told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”
- Correlate — Google Correlate finds search patterns which correspond with real-world trends. You upload your time series or geographic data, they find search terms that correlate. Very cool!
- McKinsey Internet Matters Report (PDF, free registration required) — Internet responsible for 3.4% of GDP in the countries they studied, 21% of GDP growth in last 5 years in mature countries, 2.6 jobs created for every one lost, and 75% of the Internet’s impact arises from traditional industries. Lots more like this in here. The United States captures more than 30 percent of global internet revenues and more than 40 percent of net income.