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"numbers" entries
DIY Thermal Camera, Watching Trolls Wither, Discovering Dark Social, and Student Mobile Phone Use
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Cheap Thermocam — cheap thermal imaging camera, takes about a minute to capture an image. (via IEEE Spectrum)
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Observations on What’s Getting Downvoted (Ars Technica) — fascinating piece of social work, showing how the community polices (or reacts to) trolls. (via Hacker News)
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Dark Social (The Atlantic) — Just look at that graph. On the one hand, you have all the social networks that you know. They’re about 43.5 percent of our social traffic. On the other, you have this previously unmeasured darknet that’s delivering 56.5 percent of people to individual stories. This is not a niche phenomenon! It’s more than 2.5x Facebook’s impact on the site.
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A Tethered World — All students, across all 56 represented countries, are doing generally the same few things. Facebook and Twitter, above all else, are the predominant tools for all information use among the participants. The predominance of these few tools are creating a homogenizing influence around the world.
Robocopyright, OECD Numbers, Half Of Which Are Probably Wrong, Science Incubator
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Improving Content ID (YouTube) — finally they’re adding some human intervention to lower the number of false positives.
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OECD’s Internet Economy Outlook (OECD) — lots of stats, from growth of streaming media to crime and EHRs. This caught my eye: In 2010, on average, 35% of all businesses with ten or more persons employed used the Internet for purchasing, and only 18% for selling goods and services.
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Half Of What You Know Is False — The field of scientometrics – the science of measuring and analyzing science – took off in 1947 when mathematician Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house. He stacked them in order and he noticed that the height of the stacks fit an exponential curve. Price started to analyze all sorts of other kinds of scientific data and concluded in 1960 that scientific knowledge had been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7 percent annually since the 17th century. The upshot was that scientific data was doubling every 15 years.
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Catalyst Grants — Macmillan’s Digital Science incubator.
Military Open Source, State of Internet, Visualizing Budgets, and Hacking Your iDevice
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Mil-OSS 4 — 4th military open source software working group conference, in Rosslyn VA. Oct 15-17. Tutorials and sessions will cover: Linux, Geospatial, LiDAR, Drupal, cloud, OSS policy and law, Android and many other topics. The last day will have a 1/2 day unconference for up-and-coming issues.
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State of Internet Slides (Business Insider) — Apple could buy Disney using cash at hand. Boggle. This presentation has plenty of numbers for those who like them.
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See Penny Work — an open source (GPLv2) toolkit for budget visualizations, from Code For America. (via Tim O’Reilly)
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libimobiledevice — LGPLed open source library which talks the protocols to support iPhone®, iPod Touch®, iPad® and Apple TV® devices. Unlike other projects, it does not depend on using any existing proprietary libraries and does not require jailbreaking. It allows other software to easily access the device’s filesystem, retrieve information about the device and it’s internals, backup/restore the device, manage SpringBoard® icons, manage installed applications, retrieve addressbook/calendars/notes and bookmarks and (using libgpod) synchronize music and video to the device. Runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows.
Mobile Money, Quantified Server, Mobile Chatbot, and YouTube's Content Detection
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Mobile Numbers (Luke Wroblewski) — eBay’s mobile shoppers and mobile payers are 3 to 4 times more valuable than Web only […] Yelp runs ads on the mobile web, and those ads see a higher clickthrough rate than their desktop counterparts.
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Data-Driven Restaurants (Washingtonian) — Did Elizabeth bring your Pinot Gris within three minutes of the time you ordered it? Were your appetizers delivered within seven minutes, entrées within ten, desserts within seven? Were these plates described at the table before they were set in front of you? Were napkins refolded when you went to the restroom? Was non-bottled water referred to as “ice water” (correct) or “water” (incorrect)? (via Daniel Bachhuber)
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Rei Toei (Jesse Vincent) — Writing a plugin to give Rei a new superpower is a few lines of JavaScript. Very early stage project, but one to watch. Siri + ircbots + NLP = awesome. (Open source on GitHub)
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Content Detection Fail (Ars Technica) — five other media organizations (mostly television stations, including some from overseas) had claimed the content of his video through YouTube’s Content ID system. That video? A Google+ hangout where he played NASA videos of the Mars landing. Shonky rights verification is a problem, as Google pays ad royalties to those who claim the rights–creating incentives to lie. And as Google doesn’t pay any royalties while material is disputed and the dispute is unresolved, it’s not really in Google’s interest to make this work either. (via Andy Baio)
Why We Make, Kickstarter Stats, Dodgy Domains, and Pretty Pretty Pictures
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Reality Bytes — We make things because that’s how we understand. We make things because that’s how we pass them on, and because everything we have was passed on to us as a made object. We make things in digital humanities because that’s how we interpret and conserve our inheritance. Because that’s how we can make it all anew. Librarians, preservation, digital humanities, and the relationship between digital and physical. Existential threats don’t scare us. We’re librarians.
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Kickstarter Stats — as Andy Baio said, it’s the one Kickstarter feature that competitors won’t be rushing to emulate. Clever way to emphasize their early lead.
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ICANN is Wrong (Dave Winer) — Dave is right to ask why nobody’s questioning the lack of public registration in the new domains. You can understand why, say, the Australia-New Zealand bank wouldn’t let Joe Random register in .anz, but Amazon are proposing to keep domains like .shop, .music, .app for their own products. See all the bidders for the new gTLDs on the ICANN web site.
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The Art of GPS (Daily Mail) — beautiful visualizations of uncommon things, such as the flights that dead bodies make when they’re being repatriated to their home states. Personally, I think they tend too much to the “pretty” and insufficient to the “informative” or “revealing”, but then I’m notorious for being too revealing and insufficiently informative.
Map Usage, Transit Data, Mozilla Web Maker, and Print-to-Web Design
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Mobile Maps (Luke Wroblewski) — In the US, Google gets about 31 million users a month on its Maps app on iOS. On average those users spend more than 75 minutes apiece in the app each month.
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The Importance of Public Traffic Data (Anil Dash) — Bill Gates and Paul Allen’s first collaboration was a startup called Traf-O-Data, which recorded and analyzed traffic at intersections in their hometown using custom-built devices along with some smart software. Jack Dorsey’s first successful application was a platform for dispatch routing, designed to optimize the flow of cars by optimizing the flow of information. It’s easy to see these debates as being about esoteric “open data” battles with governments and big corporations. But it matters because the work we do to build our cities directly drives the work we do to build our communities online.
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Mozilla Thimble — Write and edit HTML and CSS right in your browser. Instantly preview your work. Then host and share your finished pages with a single click.
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Design of the Guardian iPad App (Mark Porter) — thoughtful analysis of the options and ideas behind the new Guardian iPad app. Unlike the iPhone and Android apps, which are built on feeds from the website, this one actually recycles the already-formatted newspaper pages. A script analyses the InDesign files from the printed paper and uses various parameters (page number, physical area and position that a story occupies, headline size, image size etc) to assign a value to the story. The content is then automatically rebuilt according to those values in a new InDesign template for the app. (via Josh Porter)
Street View, Cultural Defects, Console Habits, and Science Videos
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StreetView: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (Adrian Holovaty) — Now, I’m realizing the biggest Street View data coup of all: those vehicles are gathering the ultimate training set for driverless cars.
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Racist Culture is a Factory Defect (Anil Dash) — so true.
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From Game Console to TV (Luke Wroblewski) — Microsoft’s Xbox video game console is now used more for watching movies and TV shows and listening to music online than playing video games online.
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Internet Everywhere — video replay from the World Science Festival.
Ebooks Numbers, Data Monopolies, Single Sign On, and Large Network Use
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E-Reading/E-Books Data (Luke Wroblewski) — This past January, paperbacks outsold e-books by less than 6 million units; if e-book market growth continues, it will have far outpaced paperbacks to become the number-one category for U.S. publishers. Combine that with only 21% of American adults having read a ebook, the signs are there that readers of ebooks buy many more books.
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Web 2.0 Ends with Data Monopolies (Bryce Roberts) — in the context of Google Googles: So you’re able to track every website someone sees, every conversation they have, every Ukulele book they purchase and you’re not thinking about business models, eh? Bryce is looking at online businesses as increasingly about exclusive access to data. This is all to feed the advertising behemoth.
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Building and Implementing Single Sign On — nice run-through of the system changes and APIs they built for single-sign on.
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How Big are Porn Site (ExtremeTech) — porn sites cope with astronomical amounts of data. The only sites that really come close in term of raw bandwidth are YouTube or Hulu, but even then YouPorn is something like six times larger than Hulu.
Watercolor Maps, Inside Displays, Numbers API, and Chinese Mobile Activations Boom
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Stamen Watercolour Maps — I saw a preview of this a week or two ago and was in awe. It is truly the most beautiful thing I’ve seen a computer do. It’s not just a clever hack, it’s art. Genius. And they’re CC-licensed.
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Screens Up Close — gorgeous microscope pictures of screens, showing how great the iPad’s retina display is.
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Numbers API — CUTE! Visit it, even if you’re not a math head, it’s fun.
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China Now Leads the World in New iOS and Android Device Activations (Flurry) — interesting claim, but the graphs make me question their data. Why have device activations in the US plummeted in January and February even as Chinese activations grew? Is this an artifact of collection or is it real?
Video Encoding, Content Identification, Mobile Numbers, and Unicode Fun
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Pirates Adopt H.264 — no more XViD encoded avi files, now it’s x264. I’m impressed by the rigid rules and structure of The Scene.
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YouTube’s ContentID Disputes Are Judged By The Accuser (Andy Baio) — the last couple years have seen a dramatic rise in Content ID abuse, using it for purposes that it was never intended. Scammers are using Content ID to steal ad revenue from YouTube video creators en masse, with some companies claiming content they don’t own, deliberately or not. The inability to understand context and parody regularly leads to “fair use” videos getting blocked, muted or monetized.
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The Month of 50% in Mobile (Luke Wroblewski) — 47.6% of mobile Internet users use native mobile apps and 47.5% use the Web browser on their devices. This is the first time (in ComScore data) native apps have had more use than the browser.
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Fake Unicode Consortium — excellent collection of better names for Unicode characters. My favourite: U+0CA0: MONOCLE OF DISAPPROVAL. (via Tom Christiansen)
