- Mobile Money (The Economist) — Many people know that “mobile money”—financial transactions on mobile phones—has taken off in Africa. How far it has gone, though, still comes as a bit of a shock. Three-quarters of the countries that use mobile money most frequently are in Africa, and mobile banking in some of them has reached extraordinary levels.
- Akka — Apache-licensed Java high-performance concurrency library built around the concept of “actors“. (via Hacker News)
- Pykka — actors in Python. (via Hacker News)
- Loom.io Project — help crowdfund a collaborative decision-making tool. They’re using it as they build the tool, and it’s the implementation of a process they use in real life. I know many organisations who need a free open-source web application that helps groups make better decisions together. You should probably read more about the interesting company Enspiral which is behind loom.io.
"Python" entries
Using Python for Computer Vision
Jan Erik Solem describes elements and useful tools for computer vision
In this interview, Jan Erik Solem, author of the upcoming book "Programming Computer Vision with Python," describes the uses for some common operations, and choices programmers have.
Four short links: 15 May 2012
Mobile Money, Actors in java, Actors in python, and a Decision-Making Tool
Developer Week in Review: NASA says goodbye to big iron
Goodbye to big iron at NASA, Microsoft opens up Visual Studio, and open source meets a rabid fan-base.
This week, NASA marked the end of an era, as the last of its big iron is retired. Microsoft continues to signal that its forays into open source are legitimate. And a new open source gaming project has a little extra horse-power, thanks to the fans behind it.
Four short links: 26 December 2011
Text Analysis Bundle, Scala Probabilistic Modeling, Game Analytics, and Encouraging Writing
- Pattern — a BSD-licensed bundle of Python tools for data retrieval, text analysis, and data visualization. If you were going to get started with accessible data (Twitter, Google), the fundamentals of analysis (entity extraction, clustering), and some basic visualizations of graph relationships, you could do a lot worse than to start here.
- Factorie (Google Code) — Apache-licensed Scala library for a probabilistic modeling technique successfully applied to […] named entity recognition, entity resolution, relation extraction, parsing, schema matching, ontology alignment, latent-variable generative models, including latent Dirichlet allocation. The state-of-the-art big data analysis tools are increasingly open source, presumably because the value lies in their application not in their existence. This is good news for everyone with a new application.
- Playtomic — analytics as a service for gaming companies to learn what players actually do in their games. There aren’t many fields untouched by analytics.
- Write or Die — iPad app for writers where, if you don’t keep writing, it begins to delete what you wrote earlier. Good for production to deadlines; reflective editing and deep thought not included.
Four short links: 22 December 2011
Fuzzy Text, Big Data Crime, Map Visualization, and Attacking Server-Side Javascript
- Fuzzy String Matching in Python (Streamhacker) — useful if you’re to have a hope against the swelling dark forces powered by illiteracy and touchscreen keyboards.
- The Business of Illegal Data (Strata Conference) — fascinating presentation on criminal use of big data. “The more data you produce, the happier criminals are to receive and use it. Big data is big business for organized crime, which represents 15% of GDP.”
- Isarithmic Maps — an alternative to chloropleths for geodata visualization.
- Server-Side Javascript Injection (PDF) — a Blackhat talk about exploiting backend vulnerabilities with techniques learned from attacking Javascript frontends. Both this paper and the accompanying talk will discuss security vulnerabilities that can arise when software developers create applications or modules for use with JavaScript-based server applications such as NoSQL database engines or Node.js web servers. In the worst-case scenario, an attacker can exploit these vulnerabilities to upload and execute arbitrary binary files on the server machine, effectively granting him full control over the server.
Four short links: 19 September 2011
The Changing Internet, Python Data Analysis, Society of Mind, and Gaming Proteins
- 1996 vs 2011 Infographic from Online University (Evolving Newsroom) — “AOL and Yahoo! may be the butt of jokes for young people, but both are stronger than ever in the Internet’s Top 10”. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
- Pandas — open source Python package for data analysis, fast and powerful. (via Joshua Schachter)
- The Society of Mind — MIT open courseware for the classic Marvin Minsky theory that explains the mind as a collection of simpler processes. The subject treats such aspects of thinking as vision, language, learning, reasoning, memory, consciousness, ideals, emotions, and personality. Ideas incorporate psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science to resolve theoretical issues such as whole vs. parts, structural vs. functional descriptions, declarative vs. procedural representations, symbolic vs. connectionist models, and logical vs. common-sense theories of learning. (via Maria Popover)
- Gamers Solve Problem in AIDS Research That Puzzled Scientists for Years (Ed Yong) — researchers put a key protein from an HIV-related virus onto the Foldit game. If we knew where the halves joined together, we could create drugs that prevented them from uniting. But until now, scientists have only been able to discern the structure of the two halves together. They have spent more than ten years trying to solve structure of a single isolated half, without any success. The Foldit players had no such problems. They came up with several answers, one of which was almost close to perfect. In a few days, Khatib had refined their solution to deduce the protein’s final structure, and he has already spotted features that could make attractive targets for new drugs. Foldit is a game where players compete to find the best shape for a protein, but it’s capable of being played by anyone–barely an eighth of players work in science.
Four short links: 24 August 2011
STM in Python, Static Web is Back, Cyberwar, and Virtual Language Education
- STM in PyPy — a proposal to add software transactional memory to the all-Python Python interpreter as a way of simplifying concurrent programming. I first learned about STM from Haskell’s Simon Peyton-Jones at OSCON. (via Nelson Minar)
- Werner Vogels’ Static Web Site on S3 — nice writeup of the toolchain to publish a web site to static files served from S3.
- China Inadvertently Reveals State-Sponsored Hacking — if UK, US, France, Israel, or Chinese citizens believe their government doesn’t have malware and penetration teams working on extracting information from foreign governments, they’re dreaming.
- MyChinese360 — virtual foreign language instruction in Mandarin, including “virtual visits” to Chinese landmarks. The ability to get native speakers virtually into the classroom makes the Internet a huge asset for rural schools. (via Lucy Gray)
Four short links: 17 August 2011
Tabular Data API, Open Stanford Courses, Wearable TV, and Wearable Sensors
- Tablib — MIT-licensed open source library for manipulating tabular data. Reputed to have a great API. (via Tim McNamara)
- Stanford Education Everywhere — courses in CS, machine learning, math, and engineering that are open for all to take. Over 58,000 have already signed up for the introduction to machine learning taught by Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research.
- Wearable LED Television — 160×120 RGBs powered by a 12v battery, built for Burning Man (natch). (via Bridget McKendry)
- Temporary Tattoo Biosensors (Science News) — early work putting flexible sensors into temporary tattoos. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 12 August 2011
Learning Adventure, Python Data Analysis, Lanyrd Technology, and New Sensor
- Hippocampus Text Adventure — written as an exercise in learning Python, you explore the hippocampus. It’s simple, but I like the idea of educational text adventures. (Well, educational in that you learn about more than the axe-throwing behaviour of the cave-dwelling dwarf)
- Pandas — BSD-licensed Python data analysis library.
- Building Lanyrd — Simon Willison’s talk (with slides) about the technology under Lanyrd and the challenges in building with and deploying it.
- Electronic Skin Monitors Heart, Brain, and Muscles (Discover Magazine blogs) — this is freaking awesome proof-of-concept. Interview with the creator of a skin-mounted sensor, attached like a sticker, is flexible, inductively powered, and much more. This represents a major step forward in possibilities for personal data-gathering. (via Courtney Johnston)
Four short links: 8 August 2011
Graph ORM, Graphic Computation, Web Intents, and Async RPC
- Bulbflow — a Python framework for graph databases: it’s like an ORM for graphs. (via Joshua Schachter)
- Nomograms — the lost art of graphical computing. (via John D Cook)
- Web Intents — adding Android-style Intents to the web. Services register their intention to be able to handle an action on the user’s behalf. Applications request to start an Action of a certain verb (share, edit, view, pick etc) and the system will find the appropriate Services for the user to use based on the user’s preference.
- Finagle (GitHub) — Twitter’s asynchronous network stack for the JVM that you can use to build asynchronous Remote Procedure Call (RPC) clients and servers in Java, Scala, or any JVM-hosted language. Finagle provides a rich set of tools that are protocol independent.