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"sensor network" entries
Tagging People, Maintenance Anti-Pattern, Insourced Brains, and Chat UI
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Human Traffickers Using RFID Chips (NPR) — It turns out this 20-something woman was being pimped out by her boyfriend, forced to sell herself for sex and hand him the money. “It was a small glass capsule with a little almost like a circuit board inside of it,” he said. “It’s an RFID chip. It’s used to tag cats and dogs. And someone had tagged her like an animal, like she was somebody’s pet that they owned.”
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Software Maintenance is an Anti-Pattern — Governments often use two anti-patterns when sustaining software: equating the “first release” with “complete” and moving to reduce sustaining staff too early; and how a reduction of staff is managed when a reduction in budget is appropriate.
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Cloud Latency and Autonomous Robots (Ars Technica) — “Accessing a cloud computer takes too long. The half-second time delay is too noticeable to a human,” says Ishiguro, an award-winning roboticist at Osaka University in Japan. “In real life, you never wait half a second for someone to respond. People answer much quicker than that.” Tech moves in cycles, from distributed to centralized and back again. As with mobile phones, the question becomes, “what is the right location for this functionality?” It’s folly to imagine everything belongs in the same place.
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Chat as UI (Alistair Croll) — The surface area of the interface is almost untestable. The UI is the log file. Every user interaction is also a survey. Chat is a great interface for the Internet of Things. It remains to be seen how many deep and meaningfuls I want to have with my fridge.
Fix the Future, Hack a Dash, Inside a $50 Smartphone, and Smartphone Sensors
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Women in Science Fiction Bundle — pay-what-you-want bundle of SF written by women. SF shapes invention, but it’s often a future filled with square-jawed men and chiseled Space Desperados, with women relegated to incidental roles. And lo, the sci-tech industry evolved brogrammers. This bundle is a good start toward a cure. Dare to imagine a future where women are people, too. (via Cory Doctorow)
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How I Hacked Amazon’s $5 WiFi Button to track Baby Data (Ed Benson) — Dash Buttons are small $5 plastic buttons with a battery and a WiFi connection inside. I’m going to show you how to hijack and use these buttons for just about anything you want. (via Flowing Data)
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The Realities of a $50 Smartphone (Engadget) — it can be done, but it literally won’t be pretty. If this thought experiment has revealed anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as a profit in the Android world any more.
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The Pocket Lab — a wireless sensor for smartphones that measures acceleration, force, angular velocity, magnetic field, pressure, altitude, and temperature.
After Search, Instrumenting Pompeii, Replaceable Work, and The Coding Adventure
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This is What Comes After Search (Quartz) — it’s “context”, aka knowing what you’re doing and thinking to the point where the device can tell you what you need to know before you search for it. Also known as the apotheosis of passive consumption.
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Wiretapping the Ruins of Pompeii — Pompeii on its way to being one of the most instrumented cities in the world, a mere two thousand years since it was last inhabited. (via Pete Warden)
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Technology is Taking Over English Departments — banausic—the kind of labor that can be outsourced to non-specialists. (via Courtney Johnston)
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phabricator — Open software engineering platform and fun adventure game. TAKE AWESOME.
A Fine Rant, Continuous Deployment, IBeacon Spec, and LaTeX Gets a Collaborative Multiplayer Mode
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Our Comrade, The Electron (Maciej Ceglowski) — a walk through the life of the inventor of the Theremin, with a pointed rant about how we came to build the surveillance state for the state. One of the best conference talks ever, and I was in the audience for it!
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go.cd — continuous deployment and delivery automation tool from Thoughtworks, nothing to do with the Go programming language. The name is difficult to search for, so naturally we needed the added confusion of two projects sharing the name. Continuous deployment is an important part of devops (“the job of our programmers is not to write code, it is to deploy working code into production”—who said this? I’ve lost the reference already).
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Apple iBeacon Developer Programme — info locked up behind registration. Sign an NDA to get the specs, free to use the name. Interesting because iBeacon and other Bluetooth LE implementations are promising steps to building a network of things. (via Beekn)
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ShareLaTeX — massively multiplayer online LaTeX. Open sourced.
Floating Point, Secure Distributed FS, Cloud Robotics, and Domestic Sensors
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What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic — in short, “it will hurt you.”
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Ori — a distributed file system built for offline operation and empowers the user with control over synchronization operations and conflict resolution. We provide history through light weight snapshots and allow users to verify the history has not been tampered with. Through the use of replication instances can be resilient and recover damaged data from other nodes.
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RoboEarth — a Cloud Robotics infrastructure, which includes everything needed to close the loop from robot to the cloud and back to the robot. RoboEarth’s World-Wide-Web style database stores knowledge generated by humans – and robots – in a machine-readable format. Data stored in the RoboEarth knowledge base include software components, maps for navigation (e.g., object locations, world models), task knowledge (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies), and object recognition models (e.g., images, object models).
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Mother — domestic sensors and an app with an appallingly presumptuous name. (Also, wasn’t “Mother” the name of the ship computer in Alien?) (via BoingBoing)
Android Malware Numbers, Open Networking Hardware, Winning with Data, and DIY Pollution Sensor
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Android Malware Numbers — (Quartz) less than an estimated 0.001% of app installations on Android are able to evade the system’s multi-layered defenses and cause harm to users, based on Google’s analysis of 1.5B downloads and installs.
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Facebook Operations Chief Reveals Open Networking Plan — long interview about OCP’s network project. The specification that we are working on is essentially a switch that behaves like compute. It starts up, it has a BIOS environment to do its diagnostics and testing, and then it will look for an executable and go find an operating system. You point it to an operating system and that tells it how it will behave and what it is going to run. In that model, you can run traditional network operating systems, or you can run Linux-style implementations, you can run OpenFlow if you want. And on top of that, you can build your protocol sets and applications.
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How Red Bull Dominates F1 (Quartz) — answer: data, and lots of it.
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Ground-Level Air Pollution Sensor (Make) — neat sensor project from Make.
Camera Heart Rate, Low Power Location, Quantified Self Radio, and a Multi Sensor
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Measuring Heart Rate with a Smartphone Camera — not yet realtime, but promising sensor development.
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iBeacons — low-power, short-distance location monitoring beacons. Any iOS device that supports Bluetooth Low Energy can become an iBeacon, and can detect other iBeacons when they are nearby. Apps can be notified when iBeacons move in and out of range of the device, and can monitor the proximity of iBeacons as their proximity changes over time.
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Analysis: The Quantified Self (BBC) — radio show on QS. Good introduction for the novice.
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Tinke — heart rate, blood oxygen, respiration rate, and heart rate variability in a single small sensor that plugs into your iOS device.
Security Sensor, Mobile Speed, Rate Limiting, and Self-Assembling Drone
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Canary (IndieGogo) — security sensor with video, motion, temperature, microphone, speaker, accelerometer, and smartphone remote control.
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Page Speed is Only The Beginning — 73% of mobile internet users say they’ve encountered Web pages that are too slow. A 1 second delay can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
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Rate Limiting and Velocity Checking (Jeff Atwood) — I was shocked how little comprehensive information was out there on rate limiting and velocity checking for software developers, because they are your first and most important line of defense against a broad spectrum of possible attacks. It’s amazing how many attacks you can mitigate or even defeat by instituting basic rate limiting. (via Alex Dong)
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Self-Assembling Multicopter (DIY Drones) — The true accomplishment of this research is that there is not one robot in control – each unit in itself decides what actions to take to keep the group in the air in what’s known as Distributed Flight Array. (via Slashdot)
Positive Copyright Coalition, Programmable World, Clever Inventors Interviewed, and Weighty Words
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Our Fair Deal — international coalition (EFF, InternetNZ, Demand Progress, Creative Freedom Foundation, many others) raising awareness and petitioning lawmakers to reject copyright proposals that restrict the open Internet, access to knowledge, economic opportunity and our fundamental rights. (via Susan Chalmers)
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Welcome to the Programmable World (Wired) — For the Programmable World to reach its full potential, we need to pass through three stages. The first is simply the act of getting more devices onto the network—more sensors, more processors in everyday objects, more wireless hookups to extract data from the processors that already exist. The second is to make those devices rely on one another, coordinating their actions to carry out simple tasks without any human intervention. The third and final stage, once connected things become ubiquitous, is to understand them as a system to be programmed, a bona fide platform that can run software in much the same manner that a computer or smartphone can. (via Sacha Judd)
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Inventables On The Road (YouTube) — new series where the Inventables folks interview their customers to show awesome projects. We’re trying to demystify the process of digital fabrication, give some visibility to people working on interesting things, and have some fun.
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Psychological Pitfalls and Lessons of a Designer Founder (Aza Raskin) — You are a founder, which means each word you say lands like an anvil. Even in a very small company, and especially in a larger one, it takes fortitude and courage for a team member to honestly critique your work. The courage required isn’t a one-time cost. It’s incurred every single time. By nature of being a founder, you are used to saying things with charisma and force and you will undoubtedly be excited by your solution and argue for it. This just makes it worse. A final note: it doesn’t matter how nice you are, or how close you are to your team. As a founder, your words are always more powerful than you think.
Analytics vs Learning, Reproducible Science, Ramping up Military Internet Attacks, and Compressed Sensing
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Analytics for Learning — Since doing good learning analytics is hard, we often do easy learning analytics and pretend that they are good instead. But pretending doesn’t make it so. (via Dan Meyer)
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Reproducible Research — a list of links to related work about reproducible research, reproducible research papers, etc. (via Stijn Debrouwere)
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Pentagon Deploying 100+ Cyber Teams — The organization defending military networks — cyber protection forces — will comprise more than 60 teams, a Pentagon official said. The other two organizations — combat mission forces and national mission forces — will conduct offensive operations. I’ll repeat that: offensive operations.
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Towards Deterministic Compressed Sensing (PDF) — instead of taking lots of data, compressing by throwing some away, can we only take a few samples and reconstruct the original from that? (more mathematically sound than my handwaving explanation). See also Compressed sensing and big data from the Practical Quant. (via Ben Lorica)