- Adafruit Flora — wearable electronics and accessories platform. (via Tim O’Reilly)
- Killed by Code — paper on software vulnerabilities in implantable medical devices. Discovered via Karen Sandler’s wow-generating keynote at linux.conf.au (covered here). (via Selena Deckelmann)
- DIY London — fun little Budget-Hero game to make apparent the trade-offs facing politicians. Kids should play Sim* and Civilization games: you get a sense of tradeoffs and consequences from these that you don’t from insubstantial activities. More City Hall games, please! (via David Eaves)
- Lessig on How Money Corrupts Congress (Rolling Stone) — glad to see Larry’s profile rising. This is key: I lay out my own voucher program that tries to do that, but the challenge isn’t as much to imagine the solution as much as it is to imagine the process to bring about the solution, given how entrenched the cancer is and how much the very people we need to reform the system depend upon the existing system. (see also an excerpt from Lessig’s new book) (via Long Now)
"maker" entries
Creating Maker-friendly cities
Cities should encourage homebrew innovation and inspiration.
Governments, particularly local governments, need to do more to understand and adapt to what might be called DIY citizenship.
Four short links: 23 January 2012
Wearable Computing, Secure Implants, Budget Game, Restoring Democracy
The maker movement's potential for education, jobs and innovation is growing
"MAKE" founder Dale Dougherty was named a "Champion of Change" by the White House.
Dale Dougherty, one of the co-founders of O'Reilly Media, was honored by the White House as a "Champion of Change" for his work on "MAKE" Magazine, MakerFaire and the broader DIY movement.
The manufacturing future
Can the United States become more competitive as a maker of things?
Dale Dougherty weaves together recent commentary and his own first-hand observations from the manufacturing world. In this piece, he asks: What can we learn from China? Can the U.S. become more competitive as a maker of things?
Make-offs: DIY indie innovations
How low-cost, open-source tools are energizing DIY.
With Maker Faire Bay Area scheduled for this weekend, we take a look at makers who are using low-cost, open-source tools to create sophisticated projects and experiments. The DIY movement in science and technology is demonstrating that it can do inexpensively what large companies and even Big Science have spent millions doing. I call them "make-offs," low-budget knock-offs of scientific and industrial technology built with off-the-shelf components.
We are iPad. Resistance is (not) futile
Apple may have closed the iPad, but you don't need permission to open it.
A lot of people are upset about how closed the iPhone, and now the iPad, are. Cory Doctorow wrote a lengthy piece about the evils of the iPad and its awful closed system. I agree that Apple has taken far too much away. I agree that it is infantalizing to require us to send in the iPad to get its battery replaced. But, my gosh, when did developers ever need permission to break things? When did Steve Jobs become not just rule maker, but some sort of deity that actually prevented me from ignoring said rule maker, and doing whatever I could with my device?
Four short links: 13 January 2010
Hacked Watch, Hackable Watch, Alpha Biogeeks, and a Tech Sweet Spot
- Telling Time with Open Realtime Data — Sony Ericsson MBW-150 bluetooth watch, showing the next few SF Muni bus arrival times for a nearby stop. The code to fetch the arrival times is running on my Droid phone, and communicating with the watch using Marcel Dopita’s OpenWatch software for the Android platform. This is a neat hack, and reminds us that every object on our person could be programmed. (via Brian Jepson)
- EZ430 Chronos — wireless, programmable, pressure sensor, accelerometer, temperature sensor, all in a watch. (via Makezine)
- Developing Bioinformatics Methods — the best method developers, in general, are those people who are both developers and users of their own methods. Regardless of what field you’re in, look for the alpha geeks: those who have both a problem and the means to solve it.
- How to Innovate Using Existing Technology (Caterina Fake) — interesting observation, that there’s a sweet spot between “just a feature” and “needs ten years of basic research in academia” to get something that’s defensible, useful, and achievable with the means of a startup. I’m a big fan of augmented human skill: using computers to make humans more effective at doing what humans are good at.
Working Together to Create a National Learning Community
National Lab Day is a National Barn-Raising for hands-on learning. Using the internet and social computing technologies, with the support of the White House, and the business and scientific communities, National Lab Day reaches out to the education community, providing a tool set that brings context, community, and passion to education, and that has the potential to transform our educational system into a true learning community.
Four short links: 4 November 2009
Electronics Hacking FAQs, Speech-To-Text Democracy, Open Source Column Database, Massive Online Analysis
- ChipHacker — collaborative FAQ site for electronics hacking. Based on the same StackExchange software as RedMonk’s FOSS FAQ for open source software.
- Democracy Live — BBC launch searchable coverage of parliamentary discussion, using speech-to-text. One aspect we’re particularly proud of is that we’ve managed to deliver good results for speech-to-text in Welsh, which, we’re told, is unique. I think of this as the start of a They Work For You for video coverage. I’d love to be able to scale this to local government coverage, which is disappearing as local newspapers turn into delivery mechanisms for real estate advertisements.
- InfiniDB: Open Source Column Database — hooks into MySQL, uses MySQL for SQL parsing, security, etc. The commercial enterprise version has multi-server support (parallel scale-out). (via Brian Aker)
- Massive Online Analysis — MOA is a framework for data stream mining. Includes tools for evaluation and a collection of machine learning algorithms. Related to the WEKA project, also written in Java, while scaling to more demanding problems. . (via joshua on Delicious)