- Poor Economics — this is possibly the best thing I will read all year, an insightful (and research-backed) book digging into the economics of poverty. Read the lecture slides online, they’ll give you a very clear taste of what the book’s about. Love that the website is so very complementary to the book, and 100% aligned with the ambition to convince and spread the word. Kindle-purchasable, too. Sample boggle (one of many): children of children born during the Chinese famine are smaller, and children who were in utero during Ramadan earn less as adults.
- The Web Is Shrinking (All Things D) — graph that makes Facebook look massively important and the rest of the web look insignificant. It doesn’t take into account the nature of the interaction (shopping? research? chat?), and depends heavily on the comScore visits metric being a reliable proxy for “use”. I’d expect to see other neutral measures of “use” decreasing (e.g., searches for “school holidays”) if overall web use were decreasing, yet they don’t seem to be. Nonetheless, Facebook has become the new millennium’s AOL: keywords, grandparents, and a zealous devotion to advertising. At least Facebook doesn’t send me #&#^%*ing CDs.
- Orphan Works Project (University of Michigan) — library will digitize orphaned works for researchers. Lovely to see someone breaking the paralysis that orphaned works induce. (via BoingBoing)
- log.io — node.js system for real-time log monitoring in your browser. (via Vasudev Ram)
"realtime" entries
The challenges of streaming real-time data
Jud Valeski on how Gnip handles the Twitter fire hose.
Gnip CEO Jud Valeski talks about managing Twitter's fire hose and how the Internet's architecture must adapt to real-time needs.
Publishing News: Survey finds ereader ownership doubled in six months
A Pew report breaks down ereaders stats, Random House and Politico team up, and lessons from Pottermore
In the latest Publishing News: U.S. readers are buying ereaders at a good clip, the 2012 election will be covered in realtime by a book publisher, and publishers can learn a couple things from JK Rowling.
Four short links: 27 June 2011
Poor Economics, Shrinking Web, Orphans Put to Work, Realtime Log Monitoring
Four short links: 23 March 2011
Health Prediction, Fake Ads, Bogus Patents, and Realtime Graphing
- The Heritage Health Competition — Netflix-like contest to analyze insurance-claims data to develop a model that predicts the number of days a patient will spend in hospital in the coming year. $3M prize. (via Aza Raskin)
- Historically Hardcore — fantastic fake Smithsonian ads that manage to make the institution sexy. Naturally they’ve been asked to take them down.
- Another Plato Innovation Ignored — turns out the above-the-fold doodle has a long and glorious history, culminating in a fantastic demonstration of our broken patent system.
- Graphite — Enterprise scalable realtime graphing. Apache 2.0-licensed, written in Python. (via John Nunemaker)
Indexing the social signal
Charlene Li on the problems and possibilities of social search and realtime updates.
Search engines used to leisurely index static results, but the rise of social media and real-time updates has changed the game. In this interview, Altimeter Group founder Charlene Li looks at how search will have to adapt to this new environment.