- Critical Thinking — a world-class resource for teaching critical thinking and Internet literacies. The ability to separate bullshit from truth (to find the gold nuggets in the butt nuggets, as it were), is how people can get the good effects of the Internet while avoiding most of the bad. (via Clay Johnson)
- Economist Direct is a Fabulous Idea — on the Economist’s offer to let you buy a single-issue subscription: it’s not a subscription; it’s more casual than that. It’s an impulscription. (via BERG London)
- OpenBTS on Droid — run a GSM network from a CDMA handset, with the help of Asterisk. Cute hack!
- How to Make an American Job, Before It’s Too Late (Andy Grove) — former head of Intel talks about the nature of jobs and industries. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
"mobile network" entries
Four short links: 6 July 2010
Critical Thinking, Impulse Buys, Cell Tower in a Handset, and American Jobs
Location in the cloud (part 1)
I’m a guest blogger this week at the 2010 Where 2.0 conference. I’ve been working with mobile location services and systems since 2000. In lieu of a heavy focus on mobile at Where 2.0 this year, Brady Forrest invited me to write a few words and offer insights into a theme around two emerging areas of mobile location data access—Wireless…
Four short links: 19 January 2010
Stack Overflow Data, Open Source GSM, Nostalgia, and Openness
- Stack Overflow Data Dump — all public data in Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and Super User.
- OpenBTS — an open-source Unix application that uses the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) to present a GSM air interface (“Um”) to standard GSM handset and uses the Asterisk software PBX to connect calls. Portable mobile phone basestation that routes calls over the Internet.
- Should We Encourage Self-Promotion and Lies? (Tom Coates) — And while encouraging people to spot the talented and the creative, we should also be considering how we shame those people who self-promote without creating. The financial collapse has taught us that rhetorical bubbles divorced from reality are a danger to us all. We’re already approaching this point – our industry has become venal, insular and dominated by marketing. We have come to value the wrong things. And if we want a continued vigorous, creative, free, open and equal environment, that’s something we have to fix. It’s not something to aspire to. Related: danah boyd’s tweet, Sometimes I feel deeply nostalgic about the days when the interwebs were filled with the techno-utopian dreams of geeks and freaks.
- The Opposite of Open is Theirs (David Weinberger) — absolutely nails the nature of openness. A quick must-read. (via timo on Delicious)
Four short links: 19 August 2009
Survivor Bias, Algorithmic Trading, S3 Tools, DIY GSM
- Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias — “Burying the other evidence: […] Doesn’t most business advice suffer from this fallacy? Harvard Business School’s famous case studies include only success stories. To paraphrase Peter, what if twenty other coffee shops had the same ideas, same product, and same dedication as Starbucks, but failed? How does that affect what we can learn from Starbucks’s success? (via Hacker News)
- A Bestiary of Algorithmic Trading Strategies — insight into the algorithms used by quant traders. Statistical arbitrageurs are a sort of squishy area, similar to arbs, but distinct from them. They find “pieces” of securities which are theoretically equivalent. For example, they may notice a drift between prices of oil companies which should revert to a mean value. This mean reversion should happen if the drift doesn’t have anything to do with actual corporate differences, like one company’s wells catching on fire. What you’re doing here is buying and selling the idea of an oil company, or in other words, a sort of oil company market spread risk. You’re assuming these two companies are statistically the same, and so they’ll revert to some kind of mean when one of the prices move. (via Hacker News)
- s3cmd — commandline tool for moving files into and out of Amazon S3.
- DIY GSM Network — wow. How to build your own GSM network. Bit by bit, the telcos are getting pressured by the hobbyists. This barbarian is looking forward to the day when the walled gardens are sacked. (via Slashdot)
ETech: Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People
[Quinn managed to scoop me blogging about Tony Jebara's presentation! But after I chatted with her, we both agreed that I should continue with my blog post and see if I can augment her post a little.] Tony Jebara's presentation "Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People" really opened my eyes to what amazing things you can…