- Improving Health Care — Adam Bosworth’s speech to the Aspen Health Forum. It starts strong and just gets better: There is a lot of talk about improving health care. And there is a lot to improve. Inadequate Evidence: We don’t know enough about what works. We should require sharing of population statistics across practices and hospitals in order to better determine what works for whom. We should reward practices and hospitals that are delivering the best most cost-effective long-term outcomes and penalize those that deliver the worst.
- topia.termextract — Python library for term extraction, so you can get a list of the nouns and noun phrases used in a piece of text. (via Simon Willison)
- Key to Understanding Network Neutrality — David Pennock neatly identifies the crucial issue, that service quality and price levels be uniformly applied and not arbitrary based on how much the service provider thinks they can gouge from the customer. The key to understanding this debate is recognizing the difference between anonymity and egalitarianism. A mechanism is anonymous if the outcome does not depend on the identity of the players: two players who bid the same are treated equally. It doesn’t matter what their name, age, or wealth is, what company they represent, or how they plan to use the item — all that matters is what they bid. This is a good property for almost any public marketplace that ensures fair treatment, and one worth fighting for on the Internet.
- (the item I linked to releases in a week’s time, I will link again when it’s live–sorry for the inconvenience. In the meantime, please enjoy this video of a monkey washing a cat)
"opensource" entries
Four short links: 12 August 2009
Health Data, Python Term Extraction, Network Neutrality, New Database
Four short links: 30 July 2009
Brooklyn Museum, Early Release, Toy Chest, Open Science
- iPhone App v1.3 Released — revealing glimpse into how third-party apps (such as this iPhone app, built on the Brooklyn Museum’s API) reflect on the institution providing the API. Brooklyn Museum has dealt with this sensitively and intelligently, a model to all. As always, I want to marry the Brooklyn Museum and raise a posse of online apps.
- Embrace the Chaos — I can never be told “release early, release often” enough. When to release? As soon as you’ve got something that’ll be useful to other people.
- Toy Chest — “Toy Chest” collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects. (via Simon Willison)
- What, Exactly, is Open Science? – In general, we’re moving towards an era of greater transparency in all of these topics (methodology, data, communication, and collaboration). The problems we face in gaining widespread support for Open Science are really about incentives and sustainability. How can we design or modify the scientific reward systems to make these four activities the natural state of affairs for scientists? Right now, there are some clear disincentives to participating in these activities. (via Glyn Moody)
Four short links: 29 July 2009
- Bioweathermap — crowdsourcing the gathering of environmental samples for DNA sequencing to study the changing distribution of microbial life. Another George Church project. (via timoreilly at Twitter)
- We Are All African Now — a great article about our genetic history and the computational genomics that makes it possible. (via Tim Bray)
- Standing Out In The Crowd — OSCON keynote by Kirrily Robert on women in open source. Excellent.
- Energy Harvesting Powers Printed LED — an interesting combination of two emerging technologies. Like an RFID, the circuit has a current induced by the presence of a changing RF field. The EL display and the RFID circuit are printed in organic compounds, whereas the power control is built with traditional circuit fabrication techniques. (via Freaklabs)
Four short links: 28 July 2009
UI Library, 3rd Party Wave Server, Mobile Phones + Parasites, Single API to Cloud Providers
- CNMAT Resource Library — The CNMAT Resource Library is our fast growing collection of materials, sensors, gestural controllers, interface devices, tools, demos, prototypes and products – all organized and annotated to support the design of physical interaction systems, “new lutherie” and art installations. (via egoodman on Delicious)
- PyGoWave Server — first third-party Google Wave server, based on Django.
- Mobile Phones Identify Parasites and Bacteria — UCB Researchers developed a cell phone microscope, or CellScope, that not only takes color images of malaria parasites, but of tuberculosis bacteria labeled with fluorescent markers.. The sensor network is built out, and the computers in our pockets surprise us with their uses. (via BoingBoing)
- libcloud — a unified interface to cloud providers, written in Python and open source. Covers EC2, EC2-EU, Slicehost, Rackspace, Linode, VPS.net, GoGrid, flexiscale, Eucalyptus. (via joshua on Delicious)
Four short links: 23 July 2009
Wave Fed, Fake Steve, Vanish and Reconnoiter
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Google Wave Federation Protocol — the interesting part of Wave for me is the system for keeping databases coherent. There’s a
reference implementationl. - I shouldn’t have yelled at that Chinese guy so much — the post that redeemed Fake Steve Jobs in my eyes. We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.
- Vanish — time-limited encryption in a Firefox plugin.
- Reconnoiter — holy cow web console and analytics for data centers, from the magic Theo Schlossnagle. He built the screenshots for his OSCON presentation, graphing streams of live performance data from dozens of data centers, while on a Virgin America flight.
Four short links: 22 July 2009
Augmented Reality, A/B Psych, Open Source Heartbeat, Launchpad Launches
- ARtisan — AR Flash library, the fastest and easiest way from point A to point B in browser based augmented reality. Love the demos on the home page. (via and bjepson)
- How to Increase Sign-ups By 200% — A/B testing from 37Signals showed that “See Plans and Pricing” got twice the clickthroughs of “Free Trial!” and variations thereon. (via kathysierra on Twitter)
- Open Source Heart Monitor, Possible Blood Sugar Level Detector — another step forward in sensor networks and personal data: I’ve set up a quick prototype of a device that will monitor my heart rate while I sleep. It includes a BUGbase + BUGvonHippel module (from my company Bug Labs). I’m also using a custom module we put together that uses a Polar radio receiver (from Sparkfun) and a Polar strap that I wear around my chest. Lastly, we wrote a simple program that runs on the BUG to log the data. (via chr1a on Twitter)
- Launchpad Opensourced — Canonical’s code hosting and collaboration platform that was heavily lusted after in the open souce world, finally open sourced and in its entirety. GNU Affero license.
Four short links: 21 July 2009
Semweb, Comedy Java, Mobile Spyware, Crypto
- On Data Reconciliation Strategies and Their Impact on the Web of Data — For years, I’ve been a fairly vocal advocate for the elegance and scalability of a-posteriori reconciliation via equivalence mappings as a superior mechanism (scale-wise) to a-priori reconciliation efforts… but this started to change very rapidly once I started working for Metaweb and saw first hand how much more effective a-priori reconciliation can be, even if drastically more expensive and limiting in the data acquisition front. (via straup on Delicious)
- Java Spring’s Biggus Dickus Effect — Nonstop administrative debris as dadaist poetry. Écriture automatique of the programming office manager or his parrot. (via mattb on Delicious)
- Arabic Blackberry Spyware — update pushed out to Arabic Blackberries CC:ed all email to the authorities. A powerful case for multi-distro platforms, which reduces the size of the market captured with one distro is pwned like this.
- NaCl – Networking and Cryptography Library — open source high-level crypto library. NaCl (pronounced “salt”) is a new easy-to-use high-speed software library for network communication, encryption, decryption, signatures, etc. NaCl’s goal is to provide all of the core operations needed to build higher-level cryptographic tools. Of course, other libraries already exist for these core operations. NaCl advances the state of the art by improving security, by improving usability, and by improving speed. Creator of qmail is one of the developers. (via Simon Willison)
How NPR is Embracing Open Source and Open APIs
Daniel Jacobson Will Talk About the NPR Open API at OSCON
News providers, like most content providers, are interested in having their content seen by as many people as possible. But unlike many news organizations, whose primary concern may be monetizing their content, National Public Radio is interested in turning it into a resource for people to use in new and novel ways as well. Daniel Jacobson is in charge making that content available to developers and end users in a wide variety of formats, and has been doing so using an Open API that NPR developed specifically for that purpose. Daniel will talk about how the project is going at OSCON next week, here's a preview of what he'll be talking about.
Four short links: 14 July 2009
Twenty Questions, CC Pix, INSERT INTO WEB, and Wash Your Hands!
- Twenty Questions about GPLv3 (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) — twenty very challenging questions about the GPLv3. foo.js is a JavaScript library released under the GPLv3. bar.js is a library with all rights reserved. For performance reasons, I would like to minimize all my site’s JavaScript into a single compressed file called foobar.js. If I distribute this file, must I also distribute bar.js under the GPL?
- CC Searching within Google Image Search — what it seems. (via waxy)
- YQL INSERT INTO — insert into {table} (status,username,password) values ("new tweet from YQL", "twitterusernamehere","twitterpasswordhere"). That’s too cool. (via Simon Willison)
- CleanWell — very low-cost recyclable enviro-friendly antimicrobials to battle third-world disease. Met the founder at Sci Foo. He said women wash hands more than men, because women enter bathrooms in pairs. Single easiest way to increase handwashing compliance is to put sinks and basins outside the room, in public view.
Four short links: 9 July 2009
- Ten Rules That Govern Groups — valuable lessons for all who would create or use social software, each backed up with pointers to the social science study about that lesson. Groups breed competition: While co-operation within group members is generally not so much of a problem, co-operation between groups can be hellish. People may be individually co-operative, but once put in a ‘them-and-us’ situation, rapidly become remarkably adversarial. (via Mind Hacks)
- Yahoo! TrafficServer Proposal — Yahoo! want to open source their TrafficServer product, an HTTP/1.1 caching proxy server. Alpha geeks who worked with it are excited at the prospect. It has a plugin architecture that means it can cache NNTP, RTSP, and other non-HTTP protocols.
- App Engine Conclusions — I’ve reluctantly concluded that I don’t like it. I want to like it, since it’s a great poster child for Python. And there are some bright spots, like the dirt-simple integration with google accounts. But it’s so very very primitive in so many ways. Not just the missing features, or the “you can use any web framework you like, as long as it’s django” attitude, but primarily a lot of the existing API is just so very primitive.
- Microsoft Hohm — Sign up with Hohm and we’ll provide you with a home energy report and energy-saving recommendations tailored to your home. Wesabe for power at the moment, with interesting possibilities ahead should Microsoft partner with smartmetering utility companies the way Google Powermeter does. This is notable because this is a web app launched by Microsoft, with no connection to Windows or other Microsoft properties beyond requiring a “Live ID” to login. For commentary, see Microsoft Hohm Gets Green Light for Launch and PC Mag. (via Freaklabs)