- Shiri = Japanese Robotic Ass (YouTube) — I couldn’t watch after 2m30s or so when he starts slapping the robot ass. I never imagined a butt as UI. I eagerly await the hobbyist version, the Arduino Ass Shield. (via Ed Yong)
- Facebook Tests ‘Pay to Promote’ Tool (BBC) — pay to raise prominence of your message, feature being tested in New Zealand. It’s when they offer splash-screen unclosable must-sit-through autoplay video ads as a product that the shark will have been jumped, caught, stripped off fins, and dumped in the ocean with a “EAT AT MORTIE’S” neon sign on its rotting corpse.
- The Newsonomics of Pricing 101 (Nieman Lab) — observes that we are starting to get data on what people will pay for, and how much. Subscribers of the Economist didn’t generally know how much they were paying, and over-estimated the price—suggesting they’d pay more. That suggests pricing power. It makes sense that publishers, new to the pricing trade, have approached it gingerly. Yet the circulation revenue upside may well be substantial. (via Julie Starr)
- Head of Google News on the Future of News — In 2009, the typical news site saw 50% of their unique traffic coming to their homepage, 20-25% from search, and 30-35% from story pages. Social was almost nonexistent. We’re now seeing the homepage receive only 25% of inbound traffic, search with 30-35%, and the rest going to story pages, a huge portion of which is driven by social networks. The Atlantic said they’re seeing 30-35% of their traffic coming from social environments. (via Tim O’Reilly)
"robotics" entries
Four short links: 14 May 2012
Robuttics, Ads-In-Your-Face Book, Pricing News, and Traffic News
Four short links: 2 March 2012
Robotics for Kids, Benchmarking Context Needed, Javascript Time Series Graphs, and Amazing Programming Video
- Interview: Hanno Sander on Robotics (Circuit Cellar) — this is what Mindstorms wants to be when it grows up. AAA++ for teaching kids. Hanno is a Kiwi Foo Camper.
- Context Needed: Benchmarks — Benchmarks fall into a few common traps because of under-reporting in context and lack of detail in results. The typical benchmark report doesn’t reveal the benchmark’s goal, full details of the hardware and software used, how the results were edited if at all, how to reproduce the results, detailed reporting on the system’s performance during the test, and an interpretation and explanation of the results. (via Jesse Robbins)
- Morris.js (GitHub) — a lightweight library that uses jQuery and Raphaël to make drawing time-series graphs easy.
- Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle (Vimeo) — the first 20m has amazing demos of a coding environment with realtime feedback. Must see this! (via Sacha Judd)
Four short links: 4 November 2011
Science Repository, Dancing Robots, Retro Jobs, and Bluetooth Bow
- Beethoven’s Open Repository of Research (RocketHub) — open repository funded in a Kickstarter-type way. First crowdfunding project I’ve given $$$ to.
- KeepOff (GitHub) — open source project built around hacking KeepOn Interactive Dancing Robots. (via Chris Spurgeon)
- Steve Jobs One-on-One (ComputerWorld) — interesting glimpse of the man himself in an oral history project recording made during the NeXT years. I don’t need a computer to get a kid interested in that, to spend a week playing with gravity and trying to understand that and come up with reasons why. But you do need a person. You need a person. Especially with computers the way they are now. Computers are very reactive but they’re not proactive; they are not agents, if you will. They are very reactive. What children need is something more proactive. They need a guide. They don’t need an assistant.
- Bluetooth Violin Bow — this is awesome in so many directions. Sensors EVERYWHERE! I wonder what hackable uses it has …
Four short links: 10 October 2011
Education Startups, Smartphone Robotics, Google SQL, and Deleted Timezones
- Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed —This fundamental investment vs. expenditure mindset changes everything. You think of education as fundamentally a quality problem. The average person thinks of education as fundamentally a cost problem. This and many other insights that repay the reading. (via Hacker News)
- Romo — smartphone robotics platform Kickstarter project.
- Google Cloud SQL — Google offers proper SQL for AppEngine. Edd notes that this happened just as Oracle offered a NoSQL server. Worth remembering that the label on the technology isn’t a magic bullet to solve your problems: SQL and NoSQL aren’t what’s important, you still must understand how they work with your particular data types and patterns of access.
- Olson Timezone Database Deleted — the USA permits copyrighting of facts, whereas facts [not being the product of a creative act] are not copyrightable in much of the rest of the world. One of the sources for historical timezone data threatened legal action, and the maintainers chose to delete their database. This is a bugger: without it, there’s no way to map GMT onto local time for arbitrary times in the past.
Four short links: 22 August 2011
Cooked Brands, HTML Bootstrap, Browser Security Headers, and Swarming Robots
- Cities in Fact and Fiction: An Interview with William Gibson (Scientific American) — Paris, as much as I love Paris, feels to me as though it’s long since been “cooked.” Its brand consists of what it is, and that can be embellished but not changed. A lack of availability of inexpensive shop-rentals is one very easily read warning sign of overcooking. I wish Manhattan condo towers could be required to have street frontage consisting of capsule micro-shops. The affordable retail slots would guarantee the rich folks upstairs interesting things to buy, interesting services, interesting food and drink, and constant market-driven turnover of same, while keeping the streetscape vital and allowing the city to do so many of the things cities do best. London, after the Olympic redo, will have fewer affordable retail slots, I imagine. (via Keith Bolland)
- Bootstrap — HTML toolkit from Twitter, includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more. Open sourced (Apache v2 license).
- Extra Headers for Browser Security — I hadn’t realized there were all these new headers to avoid XSS and other attacks. Can you recommend a good introduction to these new headers? (via Nelson Minar)
- Swarmanoid — award-winning robotics demo of heterogeneous, dynamically connected, small autonomous robots that provide services to each other to accomplish a larger goal. (via Mike Yalden)
2 makers, 2 robots, 2 visions
An errand car and a ball-shaped 'bot illustrate Maker Faire's robotic diversity.
In advance of the upcoming Maker Faire Bay Area, here's a look at two vastly different robotics projects: one aims to change the world while the other wants to roll around (and inspire some healthy creativity).