- 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)
ENTRIES TAGGED "OSCON"
Four short links: 29 July 2009
Four short links: 27 July 2009
- Ignite OSCON — 56m of video from Ignite OSCON. They’re all great, but Dan Meyer remains the highlight for me.
- gheat — a maptile server in Python, delivering heatmaps to be superimposed on Google Maps. Handy for visualization fiends.
- CaDNAno — open source software for design of 3-dimensional DNA origami. One of George Church’s projects. I love the combination of math, biology, and whimsy in open-source giftwrap. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- CommentPress — an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. I’m taking a greater interest in tools that channel and focus participation rather than simply providing “edit this page”. (via gov2.net.au’s issues paper)
OSCON: Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth
Two of my favorite presenters, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, did an OSCON session on “Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth.” Brian and Ben talked about how programmers’ insecurities cause all manner of troubles in programming projects, and then presented a number of tips for how to avoid these problems. They also asserted that there are very few genius “lone ranger”programmers in the real world — most highly successful and productive programmers work smart and collaborate well.
OSCON: The saga of MySQL
At OSCON in 2006, I followed sessions that discussed how open source companies would fare when big corporations come in. Back then there were only a handful of examples of big companies purchasing small open source companies. Three years later, we've witnessed MySQL AB get swallowed by Sun, only to have Sun be swallowed by Oracle. Now there are…
OSCON: Standing Out in the Crowd
Kirrily Robert gave the first keynote speech this morning, entitled “Standing Out in the Crowd.” She spoke about the gender imbalance in open source and shared her experiences working on open source projects that have a higher-than-average percentage of women participants. She laid out statistics about the current gender balance of various projects, looked at trends in open source, and closed with a number of tips on how open source projects can get — and keep — more women contributors.
OSCON: Building Belonging (in communities)
I dove right in to OSCON by attending Jono Bacon's "Building Belonging" community talk. Jono, who is the community manager for Ubuntu, started out his presentation by asking what communities can do to build and improve the sense of belonging that people have in their community. After talking a little about what belonging means, he threw out the first concrete…
Tonight's Ignite OSCON Line-Up
Bring the duct-tape, your head will explode. Here's the line-up for tomorrow's Ignite OSCON, starting 7.30pm in Exhibit Hall 3 of the San Jose Convention Center. (It's just before the 8.30pm Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards) Jesse Vincent (@obra) – Hacking the Kindle The Kindle is not a read-only platform. One intrepid explorer reports back from the frontier. Skud (@skud) -…
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.
Making Government Transparent Using R
Danese Cooper thinks it will be an important tool in Open Gov
With Open Source now considered an accepted part of the software industry, some people are starting to wonder if we can’t bring the same degree of openness and innovation into government. Danese Cooper, who is actively involved in the open source community through her work with the Open Source Initiative and Apache, as well as working as an R wonk for Revolution Computing, would love to see the government become more open. Part of that openness is being able to access and interpret the mass of data that the government collects, something Cooper thinks R would be a great tool for. She’ll be talking about R and Open Government at O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference, OSCON.
Sequencing a Genome a Week
Radar Talks to OSCON Speaker David Dooling
The Human Genome Project took X years to fully sequence a single human's genetic information. At Washington University's Genome Center, they can now do one in a week. But when you're generating that much data, just keeping track of it can become a major challenge in itself. David Dooling is in charge of managing the massive output of the Center's herd of gene sequencing machines, and making it available to researchers inside the Center and around the world. He'll be speaking at OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, on how he uses open source tools to keep things under control, and he agreed to give us an overview of how the field of genomics is evolving.
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