"location based services" entries

Four short links: 22 November 2012

Four short links: 22 November 2012

Urine Checkins, News Summaries, Zombie Ideas, and Scanner Plans

  1. Mark Your Territory — Urine integration for Foursquare. (via Beta Knowledge)
  2. TL;DR — news summaries. Finally.
  3. Zombie Ideas and Online InstructionThe repeated return of mistaken ideas captures well my experiences with technologies in schools and what I have researched over decades. The zombie idea that is rapidly being converted into policies that in the past have been “refuted with evidence but refuse to die” is: new technologies can cure K-12 and higher education problems of teaching and learning. The most recent incarnation of this revolving-door idea is widespread access to online instruction in K-12 education cyber-charter schools, blended schools where online instruction occurs for a few hours a day, and mandated courses that children and youth have to take.
  4. Google Open Sources Their Book Scanner — hardware designs for their clever system for high-throughput non-destructive book-scanning. (via Hackaday)

Why Uber's data fascinates a neuroscientist

The unique relationship between a brain expert and a car-sharing service.

Neuroscientist Bradley Voytek's interest in networks and nodes goes beyond the human brain. Here, he discusses the data generated by car-service company Uber and how the company has influenced his research.

Why Uber’s data fascinates a neuroscientist

The unique relationship between a brain expert and a car-sharing service.

Neuroscientist Bradley Voytek's interest in networks and nodes goes beyond the human brain. Here, he discusses the data generated by car-service company Uber and how the company has influenced his research.

Four short links: 24 October 2011

Four short links: 24 October 2011

Interactive Web Goodness, Location Based Security, Referer vs https, and Financial Charting

  1. Tangle — open source Javascript library for creating slider-type widgets in web pages, with built-in updating of other web elements. This is fantastic for exploring “what-if” scenarios. Check out the demos.
  2. Location-Based SecurityThe researchers have created a customized version of Android controlled by a “policy engine” on a server. The Android devices use Bluetooth and near-field communications infrastructure to determine the location of the user, and what level of access they have to what kind of information, as well as the level of functionality of their device. Security, however, is defined not by what you can do but by what the bad guys can’t do, and this seems very dependent upon external triggers (wifi and bluetooth) which are readily faked.
  3. Google Puts a Price on Privacy — I’d never realized before that https and referer information are only loosely compatible: Google has to go to efforts to restore referer information because browsers don’t pass the referer tag on when going from https (e.g., google.com) to http (e.g., your web site).
  4. Rocketcharts — open source Javascript financial charting library.

ePayments Week: Who will own your mobile wallet?

The who, what and how of mobile wallets. Also, Pew survey finds 1 in 4 use location services.

Three major questions about mobile wallets emerged from a recent payments conference. Also, a Pew survey finds around a quarter of Americans use the location-smart capabilities of their mobile phones.

Four short links: 5 November 2010

Four short links: 5 November 2010

Stream Processing, Semantic Web, Location Services, and PDF Extraction

  1. S4S4 is a general-purpose, distributed, scalable, partially fault-tolerant, pluggable platform that allows programmers to easily develop applications for processing continuous unbounded streams of data. Open-sourced (Apache license) by Yahoo!.
  2. RDF and Semantic Web: Can We Reach Escape Velocity? (PDF) — spot-on presentation from the data.gov.uk linked data advisor. It nails, clearly and in only 12 slides, why there’s still resistance to linked data uptake and what should happen to change this. Amen! (via Simon St Laurent)
  3. Pew Internet Report on Location-based Services10% of online Hispanics use these services – significantly more than online whites (3%) or online blacks (5%).
  4. Slate — Python library for extracting text from PDFs easily.