- Diesel: A Case Study In That Thing I Just Said — a new asynchronous I/O library in Python, which earned this fabulous review from Glyph Lefkowitz who wrote the granddaddy of all asynch libraries in Python, Twisted. Again, I don’t want to dump on Diesel here; for what it is, i.e. an experiment in how to idiomatically structure asynchronous applications, it’s all right. For that matter Twisted has its fair share of bugs too, which would be pretty easy to lay out in a similar post; you wouldn’t even need to do the research yourself, just go look at our bug tracker. But both Diesel and Tornado make the mistake of attempting to replace the years of trial-and-error, years of testing discipline, and years of portability and feature work that Twisted has accumulated with a few oversimplified, untested hacks.
- Eigenfactor — ranking and mapping scientific knowledge. Visualizations and analyses from when geeks attack scientific publishing.
- Washington Post Develops Visual, Web-like Commenting System — WebCom displays comments in a dynamic web instead of a traditional list. As new comments come in, the web gets bigger. The web, however, is not organized by chronology. King and his team believe that the most valuable comments are those that are rated highly by peers and those that spur responses. WebCom uses those criteria to organize the web. (via The Evolving Newsroom)
- Congressional Data is Defective By Design — You should have better access to this info! You should have — at your fingertips — immediate, unrestricted digital access to the full text of any piece of legislation the very moment it’s released publicly by Congress. This is punishingly ridiculous. Congress could immediately take steps to make all publicly-relevant legislative data comply with the community-derived Eight Principles of Open Government Data.[…] That is to say, bill info from Congress could and should be available today in real time, free of charge, open-source, and licensed openly, via such open-standards technologies as XML, API’s, and regular bulk data downloads. We’re entering a time where the tools and methods that make good software can help make good laws. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
"transparency" entries
ICANN without restraints: the difficulties of coordinating stakeholders
The U.S. Department of Commerce, which is
ICANN’s publicly accountable overseer, announced the most important
decision affecting ICANN since its founding: the U.S. government will
give up its role as overseer
and make ICANN independent.
Four short links: 25 September 2009
On Wheel Reinvention, Research Visualization, New Comments, and Defective Congressional Data
Computerization in Nilekani's Imagining India
Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation promises to occupy a central position in discussions about India as well as the world economy this year. Author Nandan Nilekani can speak with quite a bit of authority on computers, having founded and led Infosys, an early success story in modern Indian commerce and a major player in the historic rise of outsourcing. Particularly relevant to this blog are the book’s observations on computers’ role in the economy and society.
Four short links: 7 August 2009
Recovery.gov, Meme tracking, RFID Scans, Open Source Search Engines
- Defragging the Stimulus — each [recovery] site has its own silo of data, and no site is complete. What we need is a unified point of access to all sources of information: firsthand reports from Recovery.gov and state portals, commentary from StimulusWatch and MetaCarta, and more. Suggests that Recovery.gov should be the hub for this presently-decentralised pile of recovery data.
- Memetracker — site accompanying the research written up by the New York Times as Researchers at Cornell, using powerful computers and clever algorithms, studied the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking their appearances on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs […] For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours […] a relative handful of blog sites are the quickest to pick up on things that later gain wide attention on the Web. Confirming that blogs and traditional media have a symbiotic relationship, not a parasitic one. (via Stats article in NY Times)
- Feds at DefCon Alarmed After RFIDs Scanned (Wired) — RFID badges make for convenient security, and for convenient attack. Black hats can read your security cards from 2 or 3 feet away, and few in government are aware of the attack vector. To help prevent surreptitious readers from siphoning RFID data, a company named DIFRWear was doing brisk business at DefCon selling leather Faraday-shielded wallets and passport holders lined with material that prevents readers from sniffing RFID chips in proximity cards.
- A Comparison of Open Source Search Engines and Indexing Twitter — Detailed write-up of the open source search options and how they stack up on a pile of Tweets. While researching for the Software section, I was quite surprised by the number of open source vertical search solutions I found: Lucene (Nutch, Solr, Hounder), Sphinx, zettair, Terrier, Galago, Minnion, MG4J, Wumpus, RDBMS (mysql, sqlite), Indri, Xapian, grep … And I was even more surprised by the lack of comparisons between these solutions. Many of these platforms advertise their performance benchmarks, but they are in isolation, use different data sets, and seem to be more focused on speed as opposed to say relevance. (via joshua on Delicious)
Privacy and open government: conversations with EPIC and others about OpenID
A few days ago I proposed a way to
offer more privacy to people visiting government web sites.
This blog builds on that proposal, which was largely technical, by
examining the policy and organizational issues that swirl around it. My ideas are informed by a discussion I had with Lillie
Coney, Associate Director of the
Electronic Privacy Information Center.
The blog is also inspired by two comments on the earlier blog and
brief email I exchanged with one commenter, which intertwine with
Coney’s in intriguing ways.
Four short links: 16 July 2009
Transparency Camp, Wasted Time, Advertising Hypocrisy, Maker Skills
- Transparency Camp West — a few more slots left for Google-hosted Aug 8 and 9 Bar Camp on open government.
- Meeting Ticker — count the cost of a meeting in real time, just enter the number of people, the time it started, and the average salary. (via make on Twitter)
- More Creative Shops Are Commercializing Their Own Product Lines — Tellingly, ad companies don’t run ads for their products. “[W]e haven’t bought a single ad in support of any of our brands. Not one. Why would we? You can do so much if you know what you’re doing with product placement, sponsorship, digital PR. It’s that whole “I haven’t got any money, so I’ll have to think.” It makes you much better at grinding out media without paying. (via someone on Twitter, apologies for forgetting whom)
- 18 Essential Skills for a Maker — 13. Strip, splice, and terminate wire- Trickier than it sounds. You should be able to splice wire using a crimp splice, a wire nut, and heat shrink + solder (note: electrical tape is NOT on that list). You should know how to use a wire stripper to strip stranded wire without cutting more than one or two strands. You should be able to attach a wire to your project in such a way that it will still be attached in two weeks, two months, or two years. (via Makezine)
Personal Democracy Forum conference: initial themes
“So what’s this conference you’re going to?” asked my friends, not
braced for an explanation that usually took me more than ten minutes.
Ultimately, though, they all ended up excited about the ideas behind
Personal Democracy Forum. The first day at the Personal Democracy Forum conference revolved around the freedom to experiment, necessary infrastructure, and the
need to change.
Personal Democracy Forum ramp-up: adaptive legislation can respond to action in the agora
If legislatures could rely on public participation during the
implementation of the law, they could write laws that embrace such
input.
Twenty-five hundred years of Government 2.0
New practices in government transparency are just intensifications of
things democracies have done for a long time: public comment periods,
expert consultation, archiving deliberations, and so forth. So let's
look back a bit at what democracy has brought to government so far.
Personal Democracy Forum ramp-up: from vulnerability and overload to rage, mistrust, and fear
The grand vision for government/public collaboration is a set of
feedback loops that intensify the influence of the collective will on
government policy. But will the White House have the time and
resources to establish a foothold for a solid and lasting open
government program?