"media" entries

Four short links: 28 February 2014

Four short links: 28 February 2014

Minecraft+Pi+Python, Science Torrents, Web App Performance Measurement, and Streaming Data

  1. Programming Minecraft Pi with Python — an early draft, but shows promise for kids. (via Raspberry Pi)
  2. Terasaur — BitTorrent for mad-large files, making it easy for datasets to be saved and exchanged.
  3. BuckyOpen-source tool to measure the performance of your web app directly from your users’ browsers. Nifty graph.
  4. Zoe Keating’s Streaming Payouts — actual data on a real musician’s distribution and revenues through various channels. Hint: streaming is tragicomically low-paying. (via Andy Baio)
Four short links: 23 January 2014

Four short links: 23 January 2014

MSR Open Access, Light Table Open Source, Virality Unleashed, and Holacracy's Founder

  1. Microsoft Research Adopts Open Access Policy for Publications — +1
  2. Light Table is Open Source — this matters because these experiments in semantic interactivity inform technical UIs of the future, and the more ubiquitous this code is then the more effect it can have and the sooner we can have the future.
  3. The Six Things That Make Stories Go Viral Will Amaze and Astound You (New Yorker) — Berger and Milkman found that two features predictably determined an article’s success: how positive its message was and how much it excited its reader. The obvious part is that we develop immunity to things that catch our attention: our brains are well-developed systems for filtering, and the only constant is that advertisers will need novelty.
  4. The Story of Holacracy’s Founder (Quartz) — background on the interesting flat organisation culture system that’s gaining traction in startups.
Four short links: 9 December 2013

Four short links: 9 December 2013

Surveillance Demarcation, NYT Data Scientist, 2D Dart, and Bayesian Database

  1. Reform Government Surveillance — hard not to view this as a demarcation dispute. “Ruthlessly collecting every detail of online behaviour is something we do clandestinely for advertising purposes, it shouldn’t be corrupted because of your obsession over national security!”
  2. Brian Abelson — Data Scientist at the New York Times, blogging what he finds. He tackles questions like what makes a news app “successful” and how might we measure it. Found via this engaging interview at the quease-makingly named Content Strategist.
  3. StageXL — Flash-like 2D package for Dart.
  4. BayesDBlets users query the probable implications of their data as easily as a SQL database lets them query the data itself. Using the built-in Bayesian Query Language (BQL), users with no statistics training can solve basic data science problems, such as detecting predictive relationships between variables, inferring missing values, simulating probable observations, and identifying statistically similar database entries. Open source.
Four short links: 29 November 2013

Four short links: 29 November 2013

Hardware Market, Bio Patent History Lesson, Multiplayer Mathematics, and TV Numbers (Down)

  1. Huaqiang Bei Map for Makers — excellent resource for visitors to an iconic huge electronics market in Shenzhen. (via Bunnie Huang)
  2. A 16th Century Dutchman Can Tell us Everything We Need to Know about GMO PatentsThere’s nothing wrong with this division of labor, except that it means that fewer people are tinkering. We’ve centralized the responsibility for agricultural innovation among a few engineers, even fewer investors, and just a handful of corporations. (and check out the historical story—it’s GREAT)
  3. Polymath Projects — massively multiplayer mathematical proving ground. Let the “how many mathematicians does it take” jokes commence. (via Slashdot)
  4. Stats on Dying TV — like a Mary Meeker preso, accumulation of evidence that TV screens and cable subscriptions are dying and mobile-consumed media are taking its place.
Four short links: 5 November 2013

Four short links: 5 November 2013

Time Series Database, Cluster Schedulers, Structural Search-and-Replace, and TV Data

  1. Influx DBopen-source, distributed, time series, events, and metrics database with no external dependencies.
  2. Omega (PDF) — flexible, scalable schedulers for large compute clusters. From Google Research.
  3. GraspJSSearch and replace your JavaScript code based on its structure rather than its text.
  4. Amazon Mines Its Data Trove To Bet on TV’s Next Hit (WSJ) — Amazon produced about 20 pages of data detailing, among other things, how much a pilot was viewed, how many users gave it a 5-star rating and how many shared it with friends.
Four short links: 9 August 2013

Four short links: 9 August 2013

DEFCON Doco, Global-Scale Networks, Media Goblin, and TCP/IP Legos

  1. DEFCON Documentary — free download, I’m looking forward to watching it on the flight back to NZ.
  2. Global-Scale Systems — botnets as example of the scale of networks and systems we’ll have to build but don’t have experience in.
  3. MediaGoblin — GNU project to build a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.
  4. Teaching TCP/IP Headers with Legos — genius. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 1 July 2013

Four short links: 1 July 2013

Web Traffic Visualisation, TV Interviews, GPU Programming, and Programmatic Pants Design

  1. Web Traffic VisualizationDots enter when transactions start and exit when completed. Their speed is proportional to client’s response time while their size reflects the server’s contribution to total time. Color comes from the specific request. (via Nelson Minar)
  2. Complete Guide to Being Interviewed on TV (Quartz) — good preparation for everyone who runs the risk of being quoted for 15 seconds.
  3. Harlan (GitHub) — new language for GPU programming. Simple examples in the announcement. (via Michael Bernstein)
  4. Open Fitopen source software that investigates several approaches to generating custom tailored pants patterns. Open Fit Lab is an attempt to use this software for on-the-spot generation and creation of custom clothes. (via Kaitlin Thaney)
Four short links: 9 May 2013

Four short links: 9 May 2013

Google Ingress, Micrometer 3D Printing, Design Thinking, and Tote Bags In The Cloud

  1. On Google’s Ingress Game (ReadWrite Web) — By rolling out Ingress to developers at I/O, Google hopes to show how mobile, location, multi-player and augmented reality functions can be integrated into developer application offerings. In that way, Ingress becomes a kind of “how-to” template to developers looking to create vibrant new offerings for Android games and apps. (via Mike Loukides)
  2. Nanoscribe Micro-3D Printerin contrast to stereolithography (SLA), the resolution is between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude higher: Feature sizes in the order of 1 µm and less are standard. (via BoingBoing)
  3. ThingpunkThe problem of the persistence of these traditional values is that they prevent us from addressing the most pressing design questions of the digital era: How can we create these forms of beauty and fulfill this promise of authenticity within the large and growing portions of our lives that are lived digitally? Or, conversely, can we learn to move past these older ideas of value, to embrace the transience and changeability offered by the digital as virtues in themselves? Thus far, instead of approaching these (extremely difficult) questions directly, traditional design thinking has lead us to avoid them by trying to make our digital things more like physical things (building in artificial scarcity, designing them skeumorphically, etc.) and by treating the digital as a supplemental add-on to primarily physical devices and experiences (the Internet of Things, digital fabrication).
  4. Kickstarter and NPRThe internet turns everything into public radio. There’s a truth here about audience-supported media and the kinds of money-extraction systems necessary to beat freeloading in a medium that makes money-collection hard and freeloading easy.
Four short links: 2 May 2013

Four short links: 2 May 2013

Infographics Game, Streaming Money, Robot Interviews, and Inefficient Science Funding

  1. Metrico — puzzle game for Playstation centered around infographics (charts and graphs). (via Flowing Data)
  2. The Lease They Can Do (Business Week) — excellent Paul Ford piece on money, law, and music streaming services. So this is not about technology. Nor is it really about music. This is about determining the optimal strategy for mass licensing of digital artifacts.
  3. How Effective Is a Humanoid Robot as a Tool for Interviewing Young Children? (PLosONE) — The results reveal that the children interacted with KASPAR very similar to how they interacted with a human interviewer. The quantitative behaviour analysis reveal that the most notable difference between the interviews with KASPAR and the human were the duration of the interviews, the eye gaze directed towards the different interviewers, and the response time of the interviewers. These results are discussed in light of future work towards developing KASPAR as an ‘interviewer’ for young children in application areas where a robot may have advantages over a human interviewer, e.g. in police, social services, or healthcare applications.
  4. Funding: Australia’s Grant System Wastes Time (Nature, paywalled) — We found that scientists in Australia spent more than five centuries’ worth of time preparing research-grant proposals for consideration by the largest funding scheme of 2012. Because just 20.5% of these applications were successful, the equivalent of some four centuries of effort returned no immediate benefit to researchers.

The media-marketing merge

Can good content come from pay-to-play relationships?

I ran across a program Forbes is running called BrandVoice that gives marketers a place on Forbes’ digital platform. During a brief audio interview with TheMediaBriefing, Forbes European managing director Charles Yardley explained how BrandVoice works:

“It’s quite simply a tenancy fee. A licensing fee that the marketer pays every single month. It’s based on a minimum of a six-month commitment. There’s two different tiers, a $50,000-per-month level and a $75,000-per-month level.” [Discussed at the 4:12 mark.]

Take a look at some of the views BrandVoice companies are getting. You can see why marketers would be interested. Read more…