- Right to Access the Internet — a survey of different countries’ rights to access to access the Internet.
- Peace Through Statistics — three ex-Yugoslavian statisticians nominated for Nobel Peace Prize. In war-torn and impoverished countries, statistics provides a welcome arena in which science runs independent of ethnicity and religion. With so few resources, many countries are graduating few, if any, PhDs in statistical sciences. These statisticians collaboratively began a campaign to collect together the basics underlying statistics and statistics education, with the hope of increasing access to statistical ideas, knowledge and training around the world.
- Vintage Steve Jobs (YouTube) — he’s launching the “Think Different” campaign, but it’s a great reminder of what a powerful speaker he is and a look at how he thinks about marketing.
- Anatomy of a Fake Quotation (The Atlantic) — deconstructing how the words of a 24 year old English teacher in Japan sped around the world, attributed to Martin Luther King.
"Internet" entries
Four short links: 19 May 2011
Internet Access Rights, Statistical Peace, Vintage Jobs, and Errata Etymology
Four short links: 2 May 2011
Internet Cafe Culture, Image Processing, Library Mining, and MediaWiki Parsing
- Chinese Internet Cafes (Bryce Roberts) — a good quick read. My note: people valued the same things in Internet cafes that they value in public libraries, and the uses are very similar. They pose a similar threat to the already-successful, which is why public libraries are threatened in many Western countries.
- SIFT — the Scale Invariant Feature Transform library, built on OpenCV, is a method to detect distinctive, invariant image feature points, which easily can be matched between images to perform tasks such as object detection and recognition, or to compute geometrical transformations between images. The licensing seems dodgy–MIT code but lots of “this isn’t a license to use the patent!” warnings in the LICENSE file. (via Joshua Schachter)
- The Secret Life of Libraries (Guardian) — I like the idea of the most-stolen-books revealing something about a region; it’s an aspect of data revealing truth. For a while, Terry Pratchett was the most-shoplifted author in England but newspapers rarely carried articles about him or mentioned his books (because they were genre fiction not “real” literature). (via Brian Flaherty)
- Sweble — MediaWiki parser library. Until today, Wikitext had been poorly defined. There was no grammar, no defined processing rules, and no defined output like a DOM tree based on a well defined document object model. This is to say, the content of Wikipedia is stored in a format that is not an open standard. The format is defined by 5000 lines of php code (the parse function of MediaWiki). That code may be open source, but it is incomprehensible to most. That’s why there are 30+ failed attempts at writing alternative parsers. (via Dirk Riehle)
For election info, the Internet reaches a new high-water mark
Pew finds more than 50% of US adults used the Internet for political purposes during the 2010 elections.
New research from the Pew Internet and Life Project on the 2010 midterm elections shows that a majority of U.S. citizens are now turning to the web for news and information about politics.
Four short links: 24 February 2011
Network Snooping, Traffic Growth, Data Munging, and Open Interop
- Charles — a debugging proxy that lets a developer view all HTTP and SSL traffic between their machine and the Internet. (via Andy Baio’s excellent “How I Indexed The Daily)
- The Rise and Rise of Mobile Broadband — the Blackberry is now the standard measure of traffic, apparently. The outcome is simple – Cisco estimates that global mobile data traffic grew 159% last year and will grow another 131% this year. They contend traffic will increase 26 times versus 2010 levels, a 92% cumulative annual growth rate. I hope the network engineers are ready.
- Pattern — BSD-licensed Python tools for data retrieval (Google + Twitter + Wikipedia API, web spider, HTML DOM parser), text analysis (rule-based shallow parser, WordNet interface, syntactical + semantical n-gram search algorithm, tf-idf + cosine similarity + LSA metrics) and data visualization (graph networks). (via Hacker News)
- ODF Plugfest — when you have open standards, you need interop events like this to ensure that theoretically compatible programs are actually compatible. (via Jono Bacon on Twitter)
Four short links: 15 February 2011
New Copyright Laws Proposed, GMail APIs, Internet Book Roundup, and Chrome Farm
- White House Will Propose New Digital Copyright Laws (CNet) — If the Internet were truly empowering citizenry and bringing us this new dawn of digital democracy, the people who run it would be able to stop the oppressive grind of the pro-copyright machinery. There’s no detail about what the proposed law would include, except that it will be based on a white paper of “legislative proposals to improve intellectual property enforcement,” and it’s expected to encompass online piracy. I predict a jump in the online trading of those “You can keep the change” posters that were formerly the exclusive domain of the Tea Party, and the eventual passage of bad law. As the article says, digital copyright tends not to be a particularly partisan topic..
- Introducing Gmailr — An unofficial Javascript API for Gmail […] there are many companies […] building out complex APIs with similar functionality, that can all break independently if Gmail decides to significantly change their app structure (which they inevitably will). What we really need is for many people to come together and build out a robust and easy-to-use javascript API for Gmail that is shared across many extensions and applications. This is my hope for Gmailr. This is how Google Maps API began: reverse engineering and open source.
- The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us (New Yorker) — thoughtful roundup of books and their positions on whether the Internet’s fruits are good for us. He divides them into never better, better never (as in “we’d be better off if it had never been invented”), and ever-was (as in, “we have always been changed by our technology, so big deal”). (via Bernard Hickey on Twitter)
- New Chrome Extension Blocks Sites from Search Results — Google testing whether users successfully identify and report content farms.
The role of the Internet as a platform for collective action grows
A new Pew survey emphasizes the Internet's importance in civil society.
A new survey released released this week by the Pew Research Center's Internet and Life Project shed new light on the role of the Internet as a platform for collective action. A panel at the State of the Internet Conference discussed the findings, driving home the increasing integration of our online and offline lives.
Four short links: 2 December 2010
University IP, Apollo 13, LinkedIn Open Source, Crowdsourced Satellite
- Glasgow University to License Its IP For Free — while a small proportion of high value University of Glasgow IP will still be made available to industry through traditional licensing and spin-out companies alone, offering the bulk of IP to a larger audience for free adds value to the UK economy. (via Hacker News)
- Apollo 13 Spacelog — the Apollo 13 mission transcripts presented as though it were a chat session. Not cheesy, but an effective presentation.
- Kafka — LinkedIn’s open source pub/sub message system.
- Buy This Satellite — The owner of the world’s most capable communication satellite just went bankrupt.We’re fundraising to buy it.So we can move it to connect millions of people who will turn access into opportunity. (via Daniel Spector on Twitter)
What to consider before shortening links
URL shorteners have upside, but they also raise issues around stability, privacy, and performance.
Link shorteners have become part of the web's social fabric, but is that a good thing? In this piece we take a look at the key issues surrounding shorteners: stability, obfuscation, performance and privacy.
Four short links: 22 October 2010
Image Remapping, Internet Futures, Ebook Reader, and Open Cloud Computing
- Historical Images Remapped — Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum released historical images from their collections, and a historical photo site Sepiatown geolocated and oriented them so they can be viewed side-by-side with current Google Street View images of the same place. And then contributed the refined metadata back to the museum. A great example of your users helping to improve your data.
- Future Internet Scenarios — results of scenario planning by the Internet Society, some possible futures from open and competitive to anticompetitive centralised walled-gardens.
- OpenLibrary Bookreader — the Internet Archive’s book reader is (naturally) open source for you to reuse and improve. (via Kevin Marks on Twitter)
- OpenStack Austin Release — code to compute controller and object storage released. Competition and interoperability require exactly this kind of open cloud environment.
Four short links: 8 September 2010
Mozilla Updated License Draft, Government Problems, T3h Internets, and Online Voting System
- Alpha Draft of Mozilla Public License v2 Out — The highlight of this release is new patent language, modeled on Apache’s. We believe that this language should give better protection to MPL-using communities, make it possible for MPL-licensed projects to use Apache code, and be simpler to understand. (via webmink on Twitter)
- Challenge.gov — contest-like environment for solving problems. Not all are glowing examples of government innovation: $12,000 for healthy recipes for kids–this is not a previously-unsolved problem. More relevant: NASA Centennial Challenge to build an aircraft that can fly 200 miles in less than two hours using the energy equivalent of less than 1 gallon of gas per occupant. (via scilib on Twitter)
- A Virtual Counter-Revolution (The Economist) — It is still too early to say that the internet has fragmented into “internets”, but there is a danger that it may splinter along geographical and commercial boundaries. (via mgeist on Twitter)
- Selectricity — open source system to run online votes, from Benjamin Mako Hill.