- How Robber Barons Hijacked the Victorian Internet (ArsTechnica) — cautionary tale of the exploitation of a monopoly. Once installed as the dominant proprietor of the nation’s telegraph system, public trust in the confidentiality of Western Union transmissions evaporated. Gould “scanned the telegraph, or manipulated it, as an open book to the secrets of all the marts,” Josephson wrote.
- 350 Years of Royal Society Correspondence Online — the concept is great, the content is great, the interface lacking. (via auchmill on Twitter)
- Harvard Study: Computers Don’t Save Hospitals Money — The recently released study evaluated data on 4,000 hospitals in the U.S over a four-year period and found that the immense cost of installing and running hospital IT systems is greater than any expected cost savings. And much of the software being written for use in clinics is aimed at administrators, not doctors, nurses and lab workers. […] He pointed to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Latter Day Saints Hospital in Salt Lake City and Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis as facilities with some success in deploying efficient e-health systems. That’s because they were intuitive and aimed at clinicians, not administrators. I’m not sure anyone, not even the study’s author, knows what success looks like. Lower costs, yes. Data to improve quality of care, yes. Data to contribute to population statistics, yes. Greater throughput, yes. Fewer lost patients, yes.
- Forecasting Private Consumption: Survey-based Indicators vs. Google Trends — turns out that Google search terms over time beat some of the traditional consumer sentiment indicators. (via 130)
"trends" entries
Twitter Approval Matrix – November 2009
This is the sixth post for the Twitter Approval Matrix with data that spanned the month of November and different sources such as klout.com, tweetsentiment.com, twopular.com, scraping archives, and observations. This month I received help from Joe Fernandez the CEO of Klout.com. I have included Twitter Trends which is simply the raw trend found on Twitter. The matrix shows four quadrants used to describe trends found on Twitter.
Four short links: 3 December 2009
History Lesson, Historic Science, Hospital IT, and Predicted Consumption
Four Short Links: 28 August 2009
The Future, Python Metrics, Distributed Version Control, and Stylish R
- What The Future’s All About (Webstock Words) — Bruce Sterling on the future. We’re not going to get a future Cloud World as somehow opposed to a future Augmented Reality World. It can’t happen. The ideas can be clearly distinguished, but ideas about technology, labels for technology, predictions and suppositions about technology, they don’t map onto actual real-world technology. Human culture doesn’t work like a logical argument.
- PyMetrics — code analysis software that produces metrics for your code. (via the excellent 10 Ways To Let People Know You’re a Bad Python Programmer by Noah Gift)
- Prophet and SD 0.7 Are Now Available — Prophet is a lightweight schemaless database designed for peer to peer replication and disconnected operation. Prophet keeps a full copy of your data and (history) on your laptop, desktop or server. Prophet syncs when you want it to, so you can use Prophet-backed applications whether or not you have network. SD (Simple Defects) is a peer-to-peer issue tracking system built on top of Prophet. In addition to being a full-fledged distributed bug tracker, SD can also bidirectionally sync with your RT, Hiveminder, Trac, GitHub or Google Code issue tracker.
- Google’s R Style Guide — R is a high-level programming language used primarily for statistical computing and graphics. The goal of the R Programming Style Guide is to make our R code easier to read, share, and verify. The rules below were designed in collaboration with the entire R user community at Google. (via Bo Cowgill’s blog)
Four Short Links: 24 August 2009
Distributed Version Control Systems, Ideas Tracking, OO Survey Results, New Barcodes
- Making Sense of Revision Control Systems (ACM Queue) — good introduction to the subject from Bryan O’Sullivan, author of Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (aka Distributed Revision Control with Mercurial) that covers Subversion, Mercurial, and git. Under the distributed view of revision control, every commit is potentially a branch of its own. If Bob and Alice start from the exact same view of history, and each one makes a commit, they have already created a tiny anonymous fork in the history of the project. Neither will know about this until one pulls the other’s changes in, at which point they will have to merge with them. These tiny branches and merges are so frequent with Mercurial and Git that users of these tools look at branching and merging in a very different way from Subversion users. The parallel and branchy nature of a project’s development is clearly visible in its history, making it obvious who made which changes when, and exactly which other changes theirs were based upon.
- Ideas Are Awesome — Ideas Are Awesome is a web culture aggregator tracking emerging marketing, design, and technology memes. We are currently tracking: simplify, empower, give, inspire, connect, adapt. (via cheeky_geeky on Twitter)
- OO Concepts Survey Result — There were 3785 people who completed the survey. These charts show the proportion who gave the different possible responses for each question. If you’re an OO programmer, use this to determine how aberrant your practices are (hint: most people are neither zealous nor consistent).
- Bokode — a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. Current optical tags, such as barcodes, must be read within a short range and the codes occupy valuable physical space on products. We present a new low-cost optical design so that the tags can be shrunk to 3mm visible diameter, and unmodified ordinary cameras several meters away can be set up to decode the identity plus the relative distance and angle. The design exploits the bokeh effect of ordinary cameras lenses, which maps rays exiting from an out of focus scene point into a disk like blur on the camera sensor. (via waxy)
Four short links: 11 June 2009
Trends, Graffiti, Games, and Streaming Video
- Trending Topics — full source code for trendingtopics.org, Wikipedia trend analysis. Rails app running on the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution on EC2. (via mattb on Delicious)
- Graffiti from Pompeii — I can’t help but read these as Tweets. Herculaneum (on the exterior wall of a house); 10619: Apollinaris, the doctor of the emperor Titus, defecated well here (see also olde style Twitter) (via OvidPerl on Twitter)
- Online Games Dominate Beijing Startonomics — presentations from sessions on Chinese game business at Startonomics conference. Though there are many differences between the US and China games market, the one that stands out most is China’s ability to massively monetize games. Tencent, a leading Chinese web portal, social network and game developer, famously announced revenue of over $1 billion earlier this year, much of it coming from their avatar service. (via TinaTranT on Twitter)
- Ustream’s Audience for Apple iPhone Announcement Greater Than Cable News — Ustream is amazing, you can take a consumer handycam and video broadcast live to a greater audience than many TV shows get.
Twitter Approval Matrix
This matrix shows four quadrants used to describe tastes found on Twitter, or related sites such as hashtag.org, tweestats.com, etc. The Y-axis is partly analytical and shows popularity (mostly through scraped numbers) or perceived popularity (in the future nominated by you). The other part of the grid is more curated and subjective. The X-axis has been plotted based on my personal opinion.
Experience Syndication: Powered by Zappos
I have been thinking a lot about the new Powered by Zappos service. According to Zappos: Powered by Zappos (PBZ) is a feature Zappos.com offers to its partners where we design, host, fulfill and own a partners web site. Our goal is to provide Zappos customers as well as our partner's customers with the best possible service experience. By building…
Ignite Boston 4 – Tonight!
Ignite Boston 4 is this Thursday at the Hooley House in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston from 6:00 pm until ~10:00.
OFF=ON Trend and Ubiquitous Computing
The good folks at trendwatching.com have a new trend report up, called OFF=ON. In their words: More and more, the offline world (a.k.a. the real world, meatspace or atom-arena) is adjusting to and mirroring the increasingly dominant online world, from tone of voice to product development to business processes to customer relationships. They're absolutely right, the signs are right…
Radar Theme: Collective Intelligence
[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly] "None of us is as dumb as all of us," but the opposite of this profound truth is also true. Systems that channel individual behaviours to create new and valuable data are showing up everywhere. We point to Amazon Recommendations…