- Bribing Miners to Regulate Bitcoin — interesting! A somewhat conspiracy-theoretical take on an MIT proposal to layer identity onto Bitcoin. Features repurposed DRM tech, no less.
- Tesla Model X Quality Issues (Consumer Reports) — hardware is hard.
- Data Proofer — open source software that’s test cases for your data, to help ensure you’re not pushing corrupt data into production.
- Internet Voting? Really? (YouTube) — TEDx talk by Andrew Appel comparing physical with online voting. Very easy to follow for the non-technical.
"open source" entries
Four short links: 21 April 2016
BitCoin with Identity, Hardware is Hard, Data Test Suites, and Internet Voting
Four short links: 15 April 2016
Building Economic Models, Living in a Computer Simulation, Distributed Ledgers, and 3D-Imaged DNA
- How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time (PDF) — Hal Varian’s article is to economics research what The Manual by the KLF is to pop music.
- Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? (Scientific American) — an overview of the kind of scientific argument one normally has in the pub rather than Scientific American.
- Intel Ledger — open source experimental distributed ledger from Intel, described here.
- Berkeley Lab captures first high-res 3D images of DNA segments (Kurzweil) — “This is the first time for directly visualizing an individual double-strand DNA segment in 3D.”
Four short links: 11 April 2016
Speech GUI, AI Personality Design, Bipedal Robot, and Markets for Good
- SpeechKITT — open source flexible GUI for interacting with Speech Recognition in your web app.
- The Humanities Majors Designing AI Interactions — who else are you going to get to do it? As in fiction, the AI writers for virtual assistants dream up a life story for their bots. Writers for medical and productivity apps make character decisions such as whether bots should be workaholics, eager beavers or self-effacing. “You have to develop an entire backstory — even if you never use it,” Ewing said.
- SCHAFT’s Bipedal Robot — not an Austin Powers reference, but a clever working proof-of-concept. In theory, bipedalism allows robots to go wherever we can (versus, say, a Dalek).
- Markets for Good — Information to drive social impact.
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Four short links: 28 March 2016
Holoportation, Filter Your Bot, Curriculum for the Future, and Randomized Control Trials for Policy
- Holoportation (YouTube) — video of teleconferencing with the Hololens. I hope my avatar wears more pants than I do.
- Wordfilter — package to filter out slurs and the kinds of things you don’t want your bot saying on Twitter. (via How Not to Make a Racist Bot)
- Curriculum For the Future (iTunes) — in game form, you get to figure out how to sell your preferred curriculum (“maker!”) to the parents and politicians who care about different things. Similar game mechanic to Win the White House from Sandra Day O’Connor’s iCivics.
- Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomized Controlled Trials (PDF) — 2012 paper from the UK Cabinet Office talking about running real randomized control trials of policy. (I’d like to be part of one that looks at better health care!)
Comments Off on Four short links: 28 March 2016
Four short links: 15 March 2016
Car Hackers Handbook, Exoskeleton Regulation, Pythonic Spreadsheet, and AI Myths
- The 2016 Car Hacker’s Handbook (Amazon) — will give you a deeper understanding of the computer systems and embedded software in modern vehicles. It begins by examining vulnerabilities and providing detailed explanations of communications over the CAN bus and between devices and systems. (via BoingBoing)
- More Exoskeletons Seeking FDA Approval — The international group of exoskeleton providers with various FDA or CE certifications is growing and currently includes: Ekso in the US; Cyberdyne in the EU and Japan; ExoAtlet from Russia; and Israel’s ReWalk. Other providers are in the process of getting approvals or developing commercial versions of their products. My eye was caught by how global the list of exoskeleton companies is.
- Dirigible Spreadsheet — open source spreadsheet that’s not just written in Python, it exposes and IS python. See also Harry Percival talking about it.
- Everything You Know About AI Is Wrong (Gizmodo) — an interesting run-through of myths and claims about AI. I’m not ready to consider all of these “busted,” but they are some nice starters-for-ten in your next pub argument about whether the Matrix is coming.
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Four short links: 9 March 2016
Surveillance Capitalism, Spark in Jupyter, Spoofing Fingerprints, and Distributing SSH Keys
- The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism — The assault on behavioral data is so sweeping that it can no longer be circumscribed by the concept of privacy and its contests. […] First, the push for more users and more channels, services, devices, places, and spaces is imperative for access to an ever-expanding range of behavioral surplus. Users are the human nature-al resource that provides this free raw material. Second, the application of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science for continuous algorithmic improvement constitutes an immensely expensive, sophisticated, and exclusive 21st century “means of production.” Third, the new manufacturing process converts behavioral surplus into prediction products designed to predict behavior now and soon. Fourth, these prediction products are sold into a new kind of meta-market that trades exclusively in future behavior. The better (more predictive) the product, the lower the risks for buyers, and the greater the volume of sales. Surveillance capitalism’s profits derive primarily, if not entirely, from such markets for future behavior. (via Simon St Laurent)
- Thunder — Spark-driven analysis from Jupyter notebooks (open source).
- Hacking Mobile Phones Using 2D-Printed Fingerprints (PDF) — equipment costs less than $450, and all you need is a photo of the fingerprint. (like those of government employees stolen en masse last year)
- SSHKeyDistribut0r (Github) — A tool to automate key distribution with user authorization […] for sysop teams.
Comments Off on Four short links: 9 March 2016
Four short links: 7 March 2016
Trajectory Data Mining, Manipulating Search Rankings, Open Source Data Exploration, and a Linter for Prose.
- Trajectory Data Mining: An Overview (Paper a Day) — This is the data created by a moving object, as a sequence of locations, often with uncertainty around the exact location at each point. This could be GPS trajectories created by people or vehicles, spatial trajectories obtained via cell phone tower IDs and corresponding transmission times, the moving trajectories of animals (e.g. birds) fitted with trackers, or even data concerning natural phenomena such as hurricanes and ocean currents. It turns out, there’s a lot to learn about working with such data!
- Search Engine Manipulation Effect (PNAS) — Internet search rankings have a significant impact on consumer choices, mainly because users trust and choose higher-ranked results more than lower-ranked results. Given the apparent power of search rankings, we asked whether they could be manipulated to alter the preferences of undecided voters in democratic elections. They could. Read the article for their methodology. (via Aeon)
- Keshif — open source interactive data explorer.
- proselint — analyse text for sins of usage and abusage.
Comments Off on Four short links: 7 March 2016
Four short links: 2 March 2016
Sensing Cognitive Load, Boring is Good, Replicating SQLite, and Intro to Autonomous Robots
- An Adaptive Learning Interface that Adjusts Task Difficulty based on Brain State (PDF) — using blood flow to measure cognitive load, this tool releases new lessons to you when you’re ready for them. The system measures blood flow using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Increased activation in an area of the brain results in increased levels of oxyhemoglobin. These changes can be measured by emitting frequencies of near-infrared light around 3 cm deep into the brain tissue and measuring the light attenuation caused by levels of oxyhemoglobin. I think we all want a widget on our computer that says “your brain is full, go offline to recover,” if only to validate naptime.
- Deploying Software — Your deploys should be as boring, straightforward, and stress-free as possible. cf Maciej Ceglowski’s “if you find it interesting, it doesn’t belong in production.”
- Replicating SQLite Using Raft — rqlite is written in Go and uses Raft to achieve consensus across all the instances of the SQLite databases. rqlite ensures that every change made to the database is made to a quorum of SQLite files, or none at all.
- An Introduction to Autonomous Robots — An open textbook focusing on computational principles of autonomous robots. CC-NC-ND and for sale via Amazon.
Comments Off on Four short links: 2 March 2016
Four short links: 25 February 2016
Security Advice, Common Deep Learning Interface, React Text Editing, and Sexy Docs
- Free Security Advice (grugq) — chap wearies of handing out security advice, so gathers it and shares for all.
- TensorFuse — Common interface for Theano, CGT, and TensorFlow.
- Draft.js — a framework for building rich text editors in React, powered by an immutable model and abstracting over cross-browser differences.
- Dexy — a free-form literate documentation tool for writing any kind of technical document incorporating code. Dexy helps you write correct documents, and to easily maintain them over time as your code changes.
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Four short links: 19 February 2016
Exoskeletons Insured, Companies Rethought, IoT OS Launched, and BotNets Open Sourced
- Exoskeletons Must be Covered by Health Insurance (VICE) — A medical review board ruled that a health insurance provider in the United States is obligated to provide coverage and reimbursement for a $69,500 ReWalk robotic exoskeleton, in what could be a major turning point for people with spinal cord injuries. (via Robohub)
- New Models for the Company of the 21st Century (Simone Brunozzi) — large companies often get displaced by new entrants, failing to innovate and/or adapt to new technologies. Y-Combinator can be seen as a new type of company, where innovation is brought in as an entrepreneurial experiment, largely for seed-stage ideas; Google’s Alphabet, on the other hand, tries to stimulate innovation and risk by dividing a large company into smaller pieces and reassigning ownership and responsibilities to different CEOs.
- Zephyr — Linux Foundation’s IoT open source OS project. tbh, I don’t see people complaining about operating systems. Integrating all these devices (and having the sensors actually usefully capturing what you want) seems the bigger problem. We already have fragmentation (is it a Samsung home or a Nest home?), and as more Big Swinging Click companies enter the world of smarter things, this will only get worse before it gets better.
- A Hands-On Approach on Botnets for a Learning Purpose — these researchers are working on open source botnet software for researchers to bang on. (So you don’t need to attract the interest of actual botnet operators while you learn what you’re doing.)
