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"social software" entries
Decentralised Consensus, Disruption Critiqued, Digital Reputation, and Stuff That Matters
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Eris — a platform which allows developers and users to deploy consensus driven applications which rely on decentralized architecture and a consensus driven blockchain database backend. Open source (modified MIT).
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The Disruption Machine (New Yorker) — long detailed critique of the “disruption” hypothesis of Clayton Christensen, particularly questioning the case studies cited in The Innovator’s Dilemma.
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Web Reputation Systems and the Real World (Randy Farmer) — Don’t cross the streams. Good digital reputations should always be context-limited: the nature of the inputs should constrain the use of the reputation scores that are output.
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Bill and Melinda Gates Commencement Speech (Quartz) — excellent urging to work on stuff that matters. The pessimists are wrong in my view, but they’re not crazy. If innovation is purely market- driven and we don’t focus it on the big inequities, then we could have amazing advances and inventions that leave the world even more divided.
Swift on GitHub, HTTP APIs, PGP in Gmail, and Comments vs Community
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Swift on GitHub — watch a thousand projects launch.
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HTTP API Design Guide — extracted from work on the Heroku Platform API.
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End-to-End PGP in Gmail — Google releases an open source Chrome extension to enable end-to-end OpenPGP on top of gmail. This is a good thing. As noted FSF developer Ben Franklin wrote: Those who would give up awkward key signing parties to purchase temporary convenience deserve neither.
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Close Your Comments; Build Your Community (Annemarie Dooling) — I am rarely sad when a commenting platform collapses, because it usually means the community dissolved long before.
Problem Solving, Fashion Mining, Surprising Recommendations, and Migrating Engines
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Data Jujitsu — new O’Reilly Radar report by the wonderful DJ Patil about the exploration and problem solving part of data science. Me gusta.
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Style Finder: Fine-Grained Clothing Style Recognition and Retrieval (PDF) — eBay labs machine learning, featuring the wonderful phrase “Women’s Fashion: Coat dataset”.
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Amazon’s Drug Dealer Shopping List — reinforcing recommendations surface unexpected patterns …
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Migrating Virtual Machines from Amazon EC2 to Google Compute Engine — if you want the big players fighting for your business, you should ensure you have portability.
Collaborative Neighbourhood Storytelling, Chrome Evil, Responsive Web Instruction, and Open Source Packet Processing
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NewsPad: Designing for Collaborative Storytelling in Neighborhoods (PDF) — Microsoft Research report about tests of a tool to address needs in community reporting.
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Burying the URL — makes you suspect that “users interact with the web directly instead of via Google” is the #1 bug in Chrome’s issue tracker.
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Web Fundamentals — Google steering developers to making responsive sites, showing workflow for styling such that you can get sites that look good on all screens.
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snabbswitch — open source packet processing for ISPs.
Image Depth, Stress and Burnout, Tribal Software, and Face Recognition
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Depthy — new Google Camera app lets you capture some depth information, stored in metadata in the image. Nifty effects become possible.
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Coping with Stress and Burnout: Explanatory Power of Different Coping Strategies (PLoSone)– interesting taxonomy of burnout (overload, lack of development, and neglect) found by clustering responses to surveys, which also showed key signs. (via Psychological Science)
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Why is StackOverflow So Negative of Late? — my current theory is that social activities (sites, events, etc.) are journeys for cohorts. Newcomers don’t get as much from it, and the original cohort don’t enjoy newcomers. Social sites tend to rock at first until They arrive and ruin it for all. cf Burning Man. Newcomers will have to start their own site/event, but if they never get critical mass of the A-grade people who joined the first wave, their own event may fail.
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Surpassing Human-Level Face Verification Performance on LFW with GaussianFace (arXiv) — For the first time, the human-level performance in face verification (97.53%) on LFW [the standard “hard” face recognition data set] is surpassed. (via Medium)
Facebook Criticism, New Games, Face Recognition, and Public Uber
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The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s go back — Facebook gets worse the more you use it. The innovation within Facebook happens within a framework that’s taken as given. This essay questions that frame, well.
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Meet the People Making New Games for Old Hardware — “We’re all fighting for the same goal,” Cobb says. “There’s something artistic, and disciplined, about creating games for machines with limited hardware. You can’t pass off bloat as content, and you can’t drop in a licensed album in place of a hand-crafted digital soundtrack. To make something great you have to work hard, and straight from the heart. That’s what a lot of gamers still wish to see. And we’re happy to provide it for them.”
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DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification — Facebook research into using deep neural networks for face recognition. Our method reaches an accuracy of 97.25% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, reducing the error of the current state of the art by more than 25%, closely approaching human-level performance. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” —Jeff Hammerbacher.
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Helsinki Does Uber for Buses — Helsinki’s Kutsuplus lets you select your pick-up and drop-off locations and times, using a phone app, and then sends out a bus to take you exactly where you need to go.
Commandline iMessage, Lovely Data, Software Plagiarism Detection, and 3D GIFs
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imsg — use iMessage from the commandline.
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Facebook Data Science Team Posts About Love — I tell people, “this is what you look like to SkyNet.”
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A System for Detecting Software Plagiarism — the research behind the undergraduate bete noir.
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3D GIFs — this is awesome because brain.
Mesh Networks, Collaborative LaTeX, Distributed Systems Book, and Reverse-Engineering Netflix Metadata
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Commotion — open source mesh networks.
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WriteLaTeX — online collaborative LaTeX editor. No, really. This exists. In 2014.
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Distributed Systems — free book for download, goal is to bring together the ideas behind many of the more recent distributed systems – systems such as Amazon’s Dynamo, Google’s BigTable and MapReduce, Apache’s Hadoop etc.
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How Netflix Reverse-Engineered Hollywood (The Atlantic) — Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness.
Augmentation, Decentralised Platforms, CC0'd Legalware, and Greenwald Keynote Transcript
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Toyota Manufacturing Principles (Joseph Cohen) — Jidoka: Automation with a Human Touch. The idea of jidoka is that humans should work with machines to produce the best possible outcome, leveraging the execution ability of a machine and the judgement of a human. We at O’R Radar have been saying for years that there’s gold in the collaboration between people and machines, about augmenting people and not simply replacing them.
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Twister — the fully decentralized P2P microblogging platform leveraging from the free software implementations of Bitcoin and BitTorrent protocols. Interesting to see BT and BC reused as platforms for app development, though if eventual consistency and threading Heisenbugs gave you headaches then just wait for the world of Bitcoin-meets-BitTorrent….
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Free Uncopyrighted NDA and Employment Contracts — CC0’d legalware.
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Transcript of Glenn Greenwald’s Speech to CCC — the relationship of privacy to security, and the transparency of governmental positions on that relationship, remain unaddressed. NSA’s actions are being used to establish local governmental control of the Internet, which will destroy the multistakeholder model that has kept net architecture and policy largely separate from the whims of elected officials. The fallout of Snowden’s revelations will shape 2014. Happy New Year.
Hardware Market, Bio Patent History Lesson, Multiplayer Mathematics, and TV Numbers (Down)
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Huaqiang Bei Map for Makers — excellent resource for visitors to an iconic huge electronics market in Shenzhen. (via Bunnie Huang)
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A 16th Century Dutchman Can Tell us Everything We Need to Know about GMO Patents — There’s nothing wrong with this division of labor, except that it means that fewer people are tinkering. We’ve centralized the responsibility for agricultural innovation among a few engineers, even fewer investors, and just a handful of corporations. (and check out the historical story—it’s GREAT)
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Polymath Projects — massively multiplayer mathematical proving ground. Let the “how many mathematicians does it take” jokes commence. (via Slashdot)
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Stats on Dying TV — like a Mary Meeker preso, accumulation of evidence that TV screens and cable subscriptions are dying and mobile-consumed media are taking its place.