- School of Data — free online courses around data science and visualization.
- libshorttext — classify and analyse short-text of things like titles, questions, sentences, and short messages. MIT-style open source license, Python and C++ source.
- Letterboxd — a site for movie lovers from Kiwi Foo alums. I love people who build experiences to help people express their love of things.
- RadioBlocks and SimpleMesh — mesh networking for Arduino.
"social networks" entries
The Role of Big Data in Personalizing the Healthcare Experience: Mobile
Sensors, games, and social networking all create change in health and fitness
This article was written with Ellen M. Martin and Tobi Skotnes. Dr. Feldman will deliver a webinar on this topic on September 18 and will speak about it at the Strata Rx conference.
Cheaper, faster, better technology is enabling nearly one in four people around the world to connect with each other anytime, anywhere, as online social networks have changed the way we live, work and play. In healthcare, the data generated by mobile phones and sensors can give us new information about ourselves, extend the reach of our healers and help to accelerate a societal shift towards greater personal engagement in healthcare.
Four short links: 26 Feb 2013
Data Classes, Short Text Classification, Movie Lovers, and Mesh Networking for Hardware Hackers
Four short links: 16 November 2011
Mozilla's World View, USB Power, Farm Automation, and CSS Reference
- Q&A with Rob O’Callahan (ComputerWorld) — an excellent insight into how Mozilla sees the world. In particular how proprietary mobile ecosystems are the new proprietary desktop ecosystems, and how the risks for the web are the same (writing for one device, not for all).
- Bikes That Charge USB Devices — German bicycle maker Silverback has recently launched two bikes with built-in USB ports that can charge devices as the rider pedals. (via Julie Starr)
- Mobile Farm Robots (Wired) — The Harvest Automation robots are knee-high, wheeled machines. Each robot has a gripper for grasping pots, a deck for carrying pots, and an array of sensors to keep track of where it is and what’s around it. Teams of robots zip around nursery fields, single-mindedly spacing and grouping plants. Think Wall-E without the doe eyes and cuddly personality, or the little forest-tending ‘bots in the 1972 sci-fi classic Silent Running.
- ThinkUp 1.0 — out of beta, the software to build your own archive of your social network presence is ready for prime time. See Anil’s post for a pointed take on why this is desperately important right now.
Four short links: 26 September 2011
Design and Engineering Culture, Homemade Love, Code Tools, and Cyberbullying
- BERG London Week 328 — we’re a design company, with a design culture built over 6 years, yet we’re having to cultivate a new engineering culture that sits within it and alongside it, and the two have different crystal grains. It’s good that they do—engineering through a design process can feel harried and for some projects that does not lead to good outcomes. And vice versa. But it throws up all kinds of questions for me: do we really want two domains of engineering and design; what is the common protocol—the common language—of engineering culture, and indeed of our design culture; how do these lattices touch and interact where they meet; how do we go from an unthought process to one chosen deliberately; how is change (the group understanding of, and agreement with a common language) to be brought about, and what will it feel like as it happens. I think more and more businesses will have to explicitly confront the challenge of reconciling design with engineering, novelty with constancy, innovation with repetition. Science is doing something once in a way that others might able to reproduce, however long it takes. Business is doing it the same way a million times, as fast as possible.
- Why We Love The Things We Build — psychological research to look at people valuing the things they build. Lots of interesting findings: participants thought others would value their origami creations highly, despite assigning little value to the amateur creations of others and incomplete items were not valued as highly as completed items. (via BoingBoing)
- Gut Flora Social Network (New Scientist) — although there’s real science behind it, I think it’s mostly a callous play to get web journalists to say “this social network is a bit shit”. (via Dave Moskowitz)
- The Unintended Consequences of Cyberbullying Rhetoric (danah boyd) — actual research on bullying and cyberbullying, indicating that those involved in cyberbullying don’t think of what they’re involved in as bullying, because that implies power relationships they don’t want to acknowledge. Instead it’s all part of the “drama” of high-school.
Four short links: 26 April 2011
Android Nook, Market Failure, Social Spread Analysis, and Chinese eBooks
- Barnes and Noble Nook Color Gets Android Upgrade (Wired) — was an e-reader, but now Barnes and Noble are offering an upgrade to turn it into a fully-fledged Android tablet. The only thing you won’t be able to do is download apps from the Google marketplace. The Nook retails for $250. (via Glyn Moody)
- Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure (Ars Technica) — “In almost all cases, piracy is not an issue of legality,” says Kun Gao, CEO of the anime streaming site Crunchyroll. It’s often a market issue—and Crunchyroll turns a profit by offering anime lovers what they want: legal access to anime shows right after new episodes have aired in Japan. […] Kun claims that piracy drops “60 to 70 percent” for shows carried by Crunchyroll. (via Glyn Moody)
- Project Cascade — New York Times project analyzing tweets, retweets, bit.ly uses, and other events in the online lifecycle of stories. Built using Processing and MongoDB. (via Flowing Data)
- Survey Indicates e-book Boom in China (Xinhua) — estimates of 613M ebooks read, 23% on mobile phones. Contains the sobering the acceptable price to download an e-book from the Internet is 1.33 yuan (0.2 U.S. dollars), and nearly 54 percent of digital readers say they would pay an average of 3.45 yuan to download e-books. (via Tim O’Reilly)
Strata Week: Keeping it clean
Great data tools for R and Clojure, identifying shady Twitter memes, distributed data in Zambia, and cleaning mashed-up datasets
Red-R provides a GUI for the powerful statistics of R while Webmine makes HTML handling a breeze in Clojure; the Truthy project looks at suspicious Twitter memes; CouchDB helps provide healthcare in rural Zambia; and Google Refine cleans and sanitizes your datasets with ease.
Strata Week: Building data startups
Strata registration opens, making money with data, dolphins and cellphones, data in the dirt
In this week's look at the world of data, learn how to build a money-making data startup, register for Strata 2011, and hear of new developments in the mining of offline social networks.
Facebook Mountain ("I wish I knew how to quit you")
Why abysmal customer satisfaction levels won't stop the social giant.
Facebook is an unstoppable force, rocketing to 500 million users, building a breakout software platform and hardwiring the web with "Like" buttons and single sign-on via Facebook Connect. This piece looks at the reasons why, even in the face of abysmal customer satisfaction levels that rank below the airline industry, the social networking giant's reign is only getting started.
Promiscuous online culture and the vetting process
Social networks have forever changed hiring and background checks
Social networks, and the big data to analyze them, will forever change how we vet candidates, whether for security clearance, employment, or political office. Technology can help employers check candidates' backgrounds, monitor their behavior once hired, and protect their online reputations. But using the social tracks we share — and what we omit — has important ethical and legal consequences.
The iPad is real-life social
As a computing device, the iPad has some obvious limitations that have puzzled many tech-savvy Apple devotees, provoking a variety of critical articles explaining where Steve Jobs has gone wrong. After reading one such blog post saying that the iPad was antisocial, because it didn’t have SMS or the ability to run IM in the background, it struck me this was a restricted view of what it means to be social. The iPad is real-life social in a way that a phone and a laptop just aren’t. It will find fans not only in a family setting, but in a creative setting where collaboration and comment is in person.