- Liquid Feedback — MIT-licensed voting software from the Pirate Party. See this Spiegel Online piece about how it is used for more details. (via Tim O’Reilly)
- Putting Gestures Into Objects (Ars Technica) — Disney and CMU have a system called Touché, where objects can tell whether they’re being clasped, swiped, pinched, etc. and by how many fingers. (via BoingBoing)
- Real-time Facebook ‘likes’ Displayed On Brazilian Fashion Retailer’s Clothes Racks (The Verge) — each hanger has a digital counter reflecting the number of likes.
- Foldit Games Next Play: Crowdsourcing Better Drug Design (Nature Blogs) — “We’ve moved beyond just determining structures in nature,” Cooper, who is based at the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science in Seattle, told Nature Medicine. “We’re able to use the game to design brand new therapeutic enzymes.” He says players are now working on the ground-up design of a protein that would act as an inhibitor of the influenza A virus, and he expects to expand the drug development uses of the game to small molecule design within the next year.
ENTRIES TAGGED "software"
Open source won
What does winning look like? No enemy has been vanquished, but open source is now mainstream and a new norm.
I heard the comments a few times at the 14th OSCON: The conference has lost its edge. The comments resonated with my own experience — a shift in demeanor, a more purposeful, optimistic attitude, less itching for a fight. Yes, the conference has lost its edge, it doesn’t need one anymore.
Open source won. It’s not that an enemy…
Four short links: 7 May 2012
Democratic Software, Gesturable Objects, Likeable Fashion, and Crowdsourcing Drug Design
The UK's battle for open standards
The UK government is fighting for open standards, but it needs help.
Influence, money, a bit of drama — not things you typically associate with open standards, yet that’s what the U.K. government is facing as it evaluates open options.
Four short links: 26 April 2012
Historic Software, Flickr Javascript, Twitter Commandline, and Math Mental Habits
- Apollo Software — amazing collection of source code to the software behind the Apollo mission. And memos, and quick references, and operations plans, and …. Just another reminder that the software itself is generally dwarfed by its operation.
- flickrapi.js (Github) — Aaron Straup Cope’s Javascript library for Flickr.
- t (Github) — command-line power-tool for Twitter.
- Habits of Mind (PDF) — Much more important than specific mathematical results are the habits
of mind used by the people who create those results,and we envision a curriculum
that elevates the methods by which mathematics is created,the techniques used
by researchers,to a status equal to that enjoyed by the results of that research. Loved it: talks about the habits and mindsets of mathematicians, rather than the set of algorithms and postulates students must be able to recall. (via Dan Meyer)
The rewards of simple code
"Code Simplicity" author Max Kanat-Alexander on the elegance and utility of simple code.
Simple code is born from planning, discipline and grinding work. But as author Max Kanat-Alexander notes in this interview, the benefits of simple code are worth the considerable effort it requires.
Top Stories: March 26-30, 2012
Designing data products, five tough health care lessons, lean startup for publishers.
This week on O'Reilly: We looked at a four-step approach for designing great data products, Andy Oram shared the lessons he's learned about health care, and we learned about a competitive advantage that publishers aren't seizing.
Top stories: January 30-February 3, 2012
Hadoop deconstructed, the value of unstructured data, and a Moneyball approach to software teams.
This week on O'Reilly: Edd Dumbill examined the components and functions of the Hadoop ecosystem, Pete Warden gave a big thumbs-up to unstructured data, and Jonathan Alexander looked at how a Moneyball approach could help software teams.
Strata Newsletter: February 2, 2012
The future of software usability. In praise of unstructured data.
Highlights from the 2/2/12 edition of the Strata newsletter include: Thoughts on the evolution of software usability and why unstructured data is worth the effort.
Four short links: 1 February 2012
The Invention-Commoditisation Cycle, Software Estimations, Fullscreen Browser API, and File Formats in Javascript
- Cycles of Invention and Commoditisation (Simon Wardley) — Explosions of industrial creativity rarely follow the invention or discovery of a technology but instead its commoditisation i.e. it wasn’t the discovery of electricity but Edison’s introduction of utility services for electricity that produced the creative boom that led to recorded music, modern movies, consumer electronics and even Silicon Valley. However, utility provision of electricity did more than just create a new world, it disrupted existing industries (both directly and through reduced barriers of entry), it also allowed for new practices and methods of working to emerge and even resulted in new economic forms – such as Henry Ford’s Fordism. This isn’t a one off pattern. The cycle of invention/commoditisation repeats throughout our industrial history, following a surprisingly consistent pathway. Understanding this pattern is critical to anticipating the changes emerging in our industry today – whether that’s the web, cloud computing or the future changes that 3D printing will bring. Simon explains the Business of the Internet in one blog post. Simon is king.
- Why Are Software Development Task Estimations Regularly Off By A Factor of 2 or 3? — never a truer word spoken in parable.
- Using the Full-Screen API in Browsers (Mozilla) — useful! The older I get, the more I like full-screen mode. I found myself wishing my email client had it, then someone pointed out that was called “mutt in a shell window”. Fair ’nuff.
- File Formats in Javascript (GitHub) — pointers to libraries for different file formats in Javascript.
Software crumple zones
It's time to recognize and appreciate highly engineered health information systems.
Clinicians often encounter multi-step software processes that seem laborious. Sometimes that's due to a design flaw, but other times that process has been intentionally constructed as a crumple zone.
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