- Boomerang — a piece of javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user’s point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis. With boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is. From Yahoo!. (via Matt Biddulph)
- Ten of the Greatest Maps that Changed the World (Daily Mail) — Head of Map Collections at the British Library has a list of cartographic coolness. Businessman Charles Booth was sceptical about a claim in 1885 that a quarter of Londoners lived in extreme poverty, so he employed people to investigate. They found the true figure was 30 per cent. The findings were entered onto a ‘Master Map’ using seven colour categories, from black for ‘Lowest class, semi-criminal’ to gold for wealthy. The authorities were terrified into action, and the first council houses were built soon afterwards. (via Flowing Data)
- Open Web Analytics — provides a generic set of PHP and HTTP APIs that application developers can use to integrate web analytics into any application. The Framework also has built-in support for popular web applications such as WordPress and MediaWiki. (open source)
- Aris Games — Over the last two years, a group of researchers here at the University of Wisconsin’s Games, Learning and Society research group have been experimenting with making mobile games that teach. Along the way, we have developed an open tool for creating these mobile games. Our goal is now is to provide educators who want to use place based / inquiry / narrative / gaming activities in their curriculum with a tool that can help them build it. The ARIS engine allows game designers to place virtual items, characters and pages in physical space using the iPhone’s GPS or a little barcode that can be placed on a wall or near an object. By giving the players a story and a number of quests, games can be built that involve a mix of physical and virtual activities.
"mapping" entries
Waze: Using groups and gaming to get geodata
Waze, the company behind the free turn-by-turn navigation app of the same name, is upping its game with their latest release. It has long made referred to itself as a community mapping app, but there was no really way to be a part of a community within the app — until now. Today’s release is going to add Groups to the Waze iPhone and Android apps.
Four short links: 22 July 2010
Subjective Analytics, Great Maps, Open Web Analytics, and Locative Gaming Tool
Four short links: 16 July 2010
GPL Debate, Storage Costs, Social Software, Vodafone's Open Source
- GPL WordPress Theme Angst — a podcaster brought together Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress), and Chris Pearson (creator of the Thesis theme). Chris doesn’t believe WordPress’s GPL should be inherited by themes. Matt does, and the SFLC and others agree. The conversation is interesting because (a) they and the podcaster do a great job of keeping it civil and on-track and purposeful, and (b) Chris is unswayed. Chris built on GPLed software without realizing it, and is having trouble with the implications. Chris’s experience, and feelings, and thought processes, are replicated all around the world. This is like a usability bug for free software. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
- 480G SSD Drive — for a mere $1,599.99. If you wonder why everyone’s madly in love with parallel, it’s because of this order-of-magnitude+ difference in price between regular hard drives and the Fast Solution. Right now, the only way to rapidly and affordably crunch a ton of data is to go parallel. (via marcoarment on Twitter)
- Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Software — this resonates with me. The primary purpose of a social application is connecting with others, seeing what they’re up to, and maybe even having some small, fun interactions that though not utilitarian are entertaining and help us connect with our own humanity. Google apps are for working and getting things done; social apps are for interacting and having fun. Read it for the lobster analogy, which is gold.
- Wayfinder — The majority of all the location and navigation related software developed at Wayfinder Systems, a fully owned Vodafone subsidiary, is made available publicly under a BSD licence. This includes the distributed back-end server, tools to manage the server cluster and map conversion as well as client software for e.g. Android, iPhone and Symbian S60. Technical documentation is available in the wiki and discussions around the software are hosted in the forum. Interesting, and out of the blue. At the very least, there’s some learning to be done by reading the server infrastructure. (via monkchips on Twitter)
Four short links: 12 July 2010
Machine Learning Toolkit, Map Politics, Borg Newspaper, and Ambient Displays
- Shogun: A Large Scale Machine Learning Toolbox — open source (GPL v3), C++ with interfaces to MatLab, R, Octave, and Python. Emphasis for this toolkit is on SVM and “large scale kernel methods”.
- The Agnostic Cartographer (Washington Monthly) — land and sea are easy to measure compared to the trouble you get into when you put names on them. The end of the colonial period, hastened by World War II, ushered in a broad crisis in geographical data collection. “The modern era collapsed under its own weight,” says Michael Frank Goodchild, a British American geographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “By the 1970s it was apparent that it was no longer going to be sustainable to have a world in which national governments sustained geographic information.”
- Niu Personalized Newspaper to Launch — sign up, select news sources, and every day you get a personalized 24-page print newspaper on your doorstep. They’re not attached to print, but print is the delivery mechanism their customers preferred.
- Ambient Devices — amazing lineup of products that ambiently reflect data (mostly weather). I love the umbrella whose handle glows if you should take it today. (via data4all on Twitter)
Four short links: 8 June 2010
Neuroplasticity, Crime Landscapes, Math Help, and Visualization Tutorials
- Neuroplasticity is a Dirty Word (MindHacks) — quick roundup of some of the more important ways in which the brain changes. It’s currently popular to solemnly declare that a particular experience must be taken seriously because it ‘rewires the brain’ despite the fact that everything we experience ‘rewires the brain’. […] Clearly this is rubbish and every time you hear anyone, scientist or journalist, refer to neuroplasticity, ask yourself what specifically they are talking about. If they don’t specify or can’t tell you, they are blowing hot air. In fact, if we banned the word, we would be no worse off.
- If San Francisco Crime was Elevation — elegant way to visualise the crime statistics from DataSF. (via BoingBoing)
- Math Overflow — a Stack Overflow type site for math questions. (via evilmadscientist)
- A Protovis Primer — tutorials for the Javascript visualisation toolkit. (via Flowing Data)
Four short links: 22 April 2010
Whitehouse Source, Hot Android on iPhone Action, Geomapping, Open Data Fights Fraud
- Whitehouse Released Open Source Code — four modules for Drupal with features the White House needed, including integration with the Akamai CDN.
- Android on iPhone — it’s like constructing an apartment building out of lasagne: an astonishing feat of engineering, even if it’s not ultimately useful for anything. (via waxy)
- A Practical Guide to Geostatistical Mapping — covers R, SAGA, Google Earth, and other tools. (via Flowing Data)
- Open Data Saves Canada $3.2B — interesting case of charities fraud, where official institutions were slow to respond but opening the data that revealed the fraud prompted action. Notable to me because the investigators as outsiders didn’t have power but the data gave power to the rest of the industry, who had a stake in making sure the fraud was fixed.
Four short links: 13 April 2010
Find the Pretty, Win the Prize, Manage the Data, and Model the Temple
- 0to255 — simple cute colour-generator. (via Hacker News)
- ProPublica Wins Pulitzer Prize (NYTimes) — important landmark in the rise of online journalism. The award is a landmark for ProPublica, founded in 2007, and the other digital news outlets that have sprouted around the country. Over the last few years, the Pulitzer Prize board has relaxed the eligibility rules, allowing news sites to submit work published only online; this year there were many such submissions.
- Big Data Workshop — unconference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. (via jchris on Twitter
- 3D Machu Picchu, Created With LIDAR — viewable in Google Earth, took over 1,200 hours of work. (via skry on Twitter)
Base Map 2.0: What Does the Head of the US Census Say to Open Street Map?
Ian White, the CEO of Urban Mapping, makes his living collecting and selling geo data. For next week’s Where 2.0 has put together a panel of government mapping agencies (the UK’s Ordnance Survey and the US’s Census Department) and community-built mapping projects (Open Street Map and Waze). Crowdsourced projects like Waze and Open Street Map have forced civic agencies to reconsider their licensing.
Four short links: 24 February 2010
Mapping Data, Publishing Advice, Data Packaging, and User Reputation
- Maker! Map the World’s Data — web-based tool to make elegant maps from public data.
- Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of open textbooks (Jon Udell) — notable if only for Publishers need to be device-agnostic in the broadest sense. The printed book is one of the devices we target..
- datapkg — a data packaging tool, so you can easily find and install datasets.
- On Karma — very detailed look at user reputation, full of great takeaways. As with the FICO score, it is a bad idea to co-opt a reputation system for another purpose, and it dilutes the actual meaning of the score in its original context.
Four short links: 22 February 2010
Schuyler in Haiti, Data Principles, Damn Internet Get Off My Lawn, and Leadership Lessons
- Schuyler Erle’s blog — Schuyler, a leading geohacker, is in Haiti as part of a World Bank effort to rebuild geospatial infrastructure. His blog posts and twitpics are excellent.
- Panton Principles — basic groundrules for useful open data in science. Raises the flag of licensing: arbitrary license clauses or hastily-repurposed software licenses lead to a quagmire of incompatible licenses and prevent useful combinations of data, just as license proliferation in open source created a confusing and difficult environment for people trying to combine multiple open source projects’ code.
- The Internet? Bah! (Cliff Stohl) — piece from 1995, which I remember reading when it was first published. It stands as a great reminder that scale and change happen: in 1995 there were barely 16 million Internet users and statements like this seemed self-evident: Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople. (via Hacker News)
- Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy (YouTube) — 3m long and it’s a brilliant insight into creating a movement. Must watch. (via robertobrien on Twitter)