- Drone Journalism — two universities in the US have already incorporated drone use in their journalism programs. The Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska and the Missouri Drone Journalism Program at the University of Missouri both teach journalism students how to make the most of what drones have to offer when reporting a story. They also teach students how to fly drones, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations and ethics.
- passivedns — A network sniffer that logs all DNS server replies for use in a passive DNS setup.
- IFLA E-Lending Background Paper (PDF) — The global dominance of English language eBook title availability reinforced by eReader availability is starkly evident in the statistics on titles available by country: in the USA: 1,000,000; UK: 400,000; Germany/France: 80,000 each; Japan: 50,000; Australia: 35,000; Italy: 20,000; Spain: 15,000; Brazil: 6,000. Many more stats in this paper prepared as context for the International Federation of Library Associations.
- The god Architecture — a scalable, performant, persistent, in-memory data structure server. It allows massively distributed applications to update and fetch common data in a structured and sorted format. Its main inspirations are Redis and Chord/DHash. Like Redis it focuses on performance, ease of use and a small, simple yet powerful feature set, while from the Chord/DHash projects it inherits scalability, redundancy, and transparent failover behaviour.
"journalism" entries
Four short links: 1 March 2013
Drone Journalism, DNS Sniffing, E-Book Lending, and Structured Data Server
Four short links: 30 January 2013
Cheap Attack Drones, Truth Filters, Where Musicians Make Money, and Dynamic Pricing From Digitized Analogue Signals
- Chinese Attack UAV (Alibaba) — Small attack UAV is characterized with small size, light weight, convenient carrying, rapid outfield expansion procedure, easy operation and maintenance; the system only needs 2-3 operators to operate, can be carried by surveillance personnel to complete the attack mission. (via BoingBoing)
- TruthTeller Prototype (Washington Post) — speech-to-text, then matches statements against known facts to identify truth/falsehoods. Still a prototype but I love that, in addition to the Real Time Coupon Specials From Hot Singles Near You mobile advertising lens, there might be a truth lens that technology helps us apply to the world around us.
- Money from Music: Survey Evidence on Musicians’ Revenue and Lessons About Copyright Incentives — 5,000 American musicians surveyed, For most musicians, copyright does not provide much of a direct financial reward for what they are producing currently. The survey findings are instead consistent with a winner-take-all or superstar model in which copyright motivates musicians through the promise of large rewards in the future in the rare event of wide popularity. This conclusion is not unfamiliar, but this article is the first to support it with empirical evidence on musicians’ revenue. (via TechDirt)
- Max Levchin’s DLD13 Keynote — I believe the next big wave of opportunities exists in centralized processing of data gathered from primarily analog systems. […] There is also a neat symmetry to this analog-to-digtail transformation — enabling centralization of unique analog capacities. As soon as the general public is ready for it, many things handled by a human at the edge of consumption will be controlled by the best currently available human at the center of the system, real time sensors bringing the necessary data to them in real time.
Four short links: 2 January 2013
University Hackathon, Pretty Code, Security Talks, and Sustainable Business Models for Journalism
- 2013 Spring PenApps — a student-run hackathon held at the University of Pennsylvania, biggest university hackathon in the world. (via Jim Stogdill)
- uncrustify — Source Code Beautifier for C, C++, C#, ObjectiveC, D, Java, Pawn and VALA.
- Mirror of 29C3 Talks — all the talks from the 29th Chaos Computer Congress. (Updated from first post, which was of previous year’s talks–thanks, commenters!) (via Reddit)
- SuBMoJour — Sustainable Business Models for Journalism — International research on 69 journalistic pure players and their business models. (via Stijn Debrouwere)
Six ways data journalism is making sense of the world, around the world
Early responses from our investigation into data-driven journalism had an international flavor.
When I wrote that Radar was investigating data journalism and asked for your favorite examples of good work, we heard back from around the world.
I received emails from Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Canada and Italy that featured data visualization, explored the role of data in government accountability, and shared how open data can revolutionize environmental reporting. A tweet pointed me to a talk about how R is being used in the newsroom. Another tweet linked to relevant interviews on social science and the media:
.@digiphile Two interesting academic interviews re: data journalism we did recently: journalistsresource.org/reference/rese… & journalistsresource.org/reference/rese…
— Journalist’sResource (@JournoResource) November 26, 2012
Two of the case studies focused on data visualization, an important practice that my colleague Julie Steele and other editors at O’Reilly Media have been exploring over the past several years.
Several other responses are featured at more length below. After you read through, make sure to also check out this terrific Ignite talk on data journalism recorded at this year’s Newsfoo in Arizona. Read more…
Four short links: 8 November 2012
Local Competitive Intelligence, Journalism Doesn't Scale, Winning With Big Data, Predicting the Future
- Closely — new startup by Perry Evans (founder of MapQuest), giving businesses a simple app to track competitors’ online deals and social media activity. Seems a genius move to me: so many businesses flounder online, “I don’t know what to do!”, so giving them a birds-eye view of their competition turns the problem into “do better than them!”.
- The FT in Play (Reuters) — very interesting point in this analysis of the Financial Times being up for sale: [Traditional] journalism doesn’t have economies of scale. The bigger that journalistic organizations become, the less efficient they get. (via Bernard Hickey)
- Big Data Behind Obama’s Win (Time) — huge analytics operation, very secretive, providing insights and updates on everything.
- How to Predict the Future — This is the story of a spreadsheet I’ve been keeping for almost twenty years. Thesis: hardware trends more useful for predicting advances than software trends. (via Kenton Kivestu)
Four short links: 21 March 2012
Data Journalism, Fast Web Servers, Android App Inventor, and Daily Deal Dirt
- S0rce — gorgeous infographics. They purport to let you Think for Yourself which is bald-faced bullshit: the choice of which data to present, and the invisible collection and curation practices behind the data, is the choice of what story to tell and what it will say. That said, it’s wonderful to see the numbers (and they are attributed) behind the Republican Primary and Copyright and Piracy Legislation.
- Modern HTTP Servers are Fast — I remember when the best web engineering in the world would still fall over if a box got more than 10 hits/second. Yes, yes, I’m writing this on my grandpa box. Check out the hardware specs of the box these numbers are from.
- MIT App Inventor — web-based app designer. Does not appear to be open source. There is no long-term sustainability for this kind of development environment: when MIT decide “nah screw it, not going to run this any more” or “hmm, maybe we’ll charge for it”, you’re boned–you can download the “source” to your app in a zip file but AppInventor is the only dev environment which can consume it. I hope it’ll become the awesome and easy dev environment that Android needs, but I hope they prevent it from being a dead end.
- Daily Deals: Prediction, Social Diffusion, and Reputational Ramifications — we consider the effects of daily deals on the longer-term reputation of merchants, based on their Yelp reviews before and after they run a daily deal. Our analysis shows that while the number of reviews increases significantly due to daily deals, average rating scores from reviewers who mention daily deals are 10% lower than scores of their peers on average. (via Greg Linden)
Top Stories: December 12-16, 2011
Five data predictions for 2012, a Kindle Single and long-form journalism, and the frustrations of the mobile experience.
This week on O'Reilly: Edd Dumbill offered five big data predictions for the year to come, Marc Herman discussed his new Kindle Single and how that platform could help long-form journalism, and Joshua Bixby examined mobile frustrations and expectations.
Publishing News: One publishing experiment ends, another begins
Seth Godin ends The Domino Project, Marc Herman blazes a journalism trail, and authors get personal on tour.
The Domino Project published its final book. Elsewhere, Marc Herman took his long-form journalism straight to a Kindle Single and the WSJ looked at the changing roles of authors on book tours.
How I automated my writing career
A former author uses data and software to take the tedium out of some kinds of writing.
You scale content businesses by increasing the number of people who create the content … or so conventional wisdom says. Learn how a former author is using software to simulate and expand human-quality writing.
The work of data journalism: Find, clean, analyze, create … repeat
Simon Rogers on the effort behind data journalism.
Great journalism does not magically spring from spreadsheets. In this interview, Simon Rogers discusses the grunt work and tools behind The Guardian's data stories.