- Code Talks and Designers Don’t Speak the Language (Crystal Beasley) — Many of the bugs, however, require a deep understanding of why the product exists in the marketplace and a thorough understanding of the research that underpins the project. These strategic questions are analogous to what a software architect would do. I was on the Persona project full time for three months before I felt confident making significant choices about UX.
- Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials (British Medical Journal) — you don’t need to subscribe to appreciate this.
- html5test — see how the browsers stack up in features and compliance.
- Backbone Fundamentals — A creative-commons book on Backbone.js for beginners and advanced users alike.
ENTRIES TAGGED "science"
Four short links: 12 October 2012
Designers and Coders, Randomised Parachute Trials, Testing HTML5 Features, and Backbone Book
Four short links: 5 October 2012
Robocopyright, OECD Numbers, Half Of Which Are Probably Wrong, Science Incubator
- Improving Content ID (YouTube) — finally they’re adding some human intervention to lower the number of false positives.
- OECD’s Internet Economy Outlook (OECD) — lots of stats, from growth of streaming media to crime and EHRs. This caught my eye: In 2010, on average, 35% of all businesses with ten or more persons employed used the Internet for purchasing, and only 18% for selling goods and services.
- Half Of What You Know Is False — The field of scientometrics – the science of measuring and analyzing science – took off in 1947 when mathematician Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house. He stacked them in order and he noticed that the height of the stacks fit an exponential curve. Price started to analyze all sorts of other kinds of scientific data and concluded in 1960 that scientific knowledge had been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7 percent annually since the 17th century. The upshot was that scientific data was doubling every 15 years.
- Catalyst Grants — Macmillan’s Digital Science incubator.
Four short links: 11 September 2012
3D Printing Art, Speedy Web, Display Divergence, and 3D Printing Science
- Liz Neely Talks 3D Digitisation, 3D Printing (Seb Chan) — On July 19th, Tom and Mike Moceri arrived at the Art Institute dock in a shiny black SUV with a BATMAN license plate and a trunk packed with a couple Makerbots. Our event was different from #Met3D in that we focused on allowing staff to experience 3D scanning and printing first hand. We began the day using iPads and 123D Catch to scan artworks. In the afternoon, the two Makerbots started printing in our Ryan Education Center and Mike demonstrated modelling techniques, including some examples using a Microsoft Kinect.
- Keys to a Fast Web App (Steve Souders) — I’m obsessed with caching. It’s the biggest missed opportunity and so I’m going to spend the next few months focused on caching. Analyzing caching is difficult. In the lab it’s hard (and time consuming) to test filling and clearing the cache. There’s no caching API that makes it easy to manipulate and measure.
- So Many Devices (Luke Wroblewski) — so many different screen sizes and pixel densities to worry about.
- 3D-Printed Tools in the DeRisi Lab — “There’s hardly a microscope in our building that does not have some 3D-printed part on it.” —Joseph DeRisi, UCSF.
Four short links: 7 September 2012
Collections, Games, Accessibility, and Science
- GS-Collections (GitHub) — Goldman Sachs open-sourced (Apache-licensed) their Java collection library, full of lambda goodness. No report on whether it requires a 750G bailout.
- Learning ZIL — old manual for the interactive fiction programming language that Zork and other Infocom games were written in. Virtual machines on a Z80 processor? They were hardcore before your time.
- NZ Government Web Toolkit — information and guides on accessibility standards.
- Workshop on Research and Resource Commons in Scientific Research: Final Report — This diverse group discussed the current state of policy and technology as it relates to a scientific research commons, and identified key opportunities and challenges, as well as next steps, for the scientific community in general and Creative Commons in particular. Wilbanks describes as, “Sort of a wrapup after seven years of SC.” (via John Wilbanks)
Four short links: 5 September 2012
DIY Spectrometry, Mind-Controlled Drones, Javascript Games, and Open Source Font
- DIY Spectrometry Kit — This open hardware kit costs only $35, but has a range of more than 400-900 nanometers, and a resolution of as high as 3 nm. A spectrometer is essentially a tool to measure the colors absorbed by a material. You can construct this one yourself from a piece of a DVD-R, black paper, a VHS box, and an HD USB webcam.
- Mind-Controlled Drones — Chinese demo of EEG to Bluetooth to laptop to wifi to UAV.
- Pac-Man in Javascript — in-browser loving recreation of a bunch of original Pac-Man games, with source on github. Cf this article on building Atari Arcade in CreateJS. (via Javascript Weekly)
- Source Sans — Adobe’s first open source typeface.
Four short links: 31 August 2012
Code Typing Tutor,
- typing.io — a typing tutor for code.
- Sheep to Warn Shepherds of Wolf Attack by SMS — around 10 sheep were each equipped with a heart monitor before being targeted by a pair of Wolfdogs—both of which were muzzled. (via Beta Knowledge)
- New Species Found on Flickr (NPR) — Guek had noticed the insect while hiking the jungles of Malaysia, taken the photos, and then watched it fly away. I just love the idea of entomologists bringing up richly-coloured hi-res shots of insects from Flickr. Can’t figure out whether to parody as porn fetish or as if they were using movie tech (“can we enhance that?”)
- Position Correcting Tools for 2D Digital Fabrication — in our approach, the user coarsely positions a frame containing the tool in an approximation of the desired path, while the device tracks the frame’s location and adjusts the position of the tool within the frame to correct the user’s positioning error in real time. Because the automatic positioning need only cover the range of the human’s positioning error, this frame can be small and inexpensive, and because the human has unlimited range, such a frame can be used to precisely position tools over an unlimited range.
Four short links: 30 August 2012
Decoding ToS, Impact Factors are Nonsense, Crappy Open Source Code, and Data Mining History
- TOS;DR — terms of service rendered comprehensible. “Make the hard stuff easy” is a great template for good ideas, and this just nails it.
- Sick of Impact Factors — typically only 15% of the papers in a journal account for half the total citations. Therefore only this minority of the articles has more than the average number of citations denoted by the journal impact factor. Take a moment to think about what that means: the vast majority of the journal’s papers — fully 85% — have fewer citations than the average. The impact factor is a statistically indefensible indicator of journal performance; it flatters to deceive, distributing credit that has been earned by only a small fraction of its published papers. (via Sci Blogs)
- A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (ACM) — Today’s Unix/Posix-like operating systems, even including IBM’s z/OS mainframe version, as seen with 1980 eyes are identical; yet the 31,085 lines of configure for libtool still check if and exist, even though the Unixen, which lacked them, had neither sufficient memory to execute libtool nor disks big enough for its 16-MB source code. [...] That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT “professionals” who wouldn’t recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution. (Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.)
- History as Science (Nature) — Turchin and his allies contend that the time is ripe to revisit general laws, thanks to tools such as nonlinear mathematics, simulations that can model the interactions of thousands or millions of individuals at once, and informatics technologies for gathering and analysing huge databases of historical information.
The future of medicine relies on massive collection of real-life data
An interview with Shahid Shah
Health care costs rise as doctors try batches of treatments that don’t work in search of one that does. Meanwhile, drug companies spend billions on developing each drug and increasingly end up with nothing to show for their pains. This is the alarming state of medical science today. Shahid Shah, device developer and system integrator, sees a different paradigm…
Four short links: 24 August 2012
PublicSpeaking App, Wacky Javascript, Open Science in R, and Surviving DDOS
- Speak Like a Pro (iTunes) — practice public speaking, and your phone will rate your performance and give you tips to improve. (via Idealog)
- If Hemingway Wrote Javascript — glorious. I swear I marked Andre Breton’s assignments at university. (via BoingBoing)
- R Open Sci — open source R packages that provide programmatic access to a variety of scientific data, full-text of journal articles, and repositories that provide real-time metrics of scholarly impact.
- Keeping Your Site Alive (EFF) — guide to surviving DDOS attacks. (via BoingBoing)
DNA: The perfect backup medium
DNA storage could change the way we store and archive information.
It wasn’t enough for Dr. George Church to help Gilbert “discover” DNA sequencing 30 years ago, create the foundations for genomics, create the Personal Genome Project, drive down the cost of sequencing, and start humanity down the road of synthetic biology. No, that wasn’t enough.
He and his team decided to publish an easily understood scientific paper (““Next-generation…
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