- Delivereads — genius idea, a mailing list for Kindles. Yes, if you can send email then you can be a Kindle publisher. (via Sacha Judd)
- Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives — We measure abnormal returns for more than 16,000 common stock transactions made by approximately 300 House delegates from 1985 to 2001. Consistent with the study of Senatorial trading activity, we find stocks purchased by Representatives also earn significant positive abnormal returns (albeit considerably smaller returns). A portfolio that mimics the purchases of House Members beats the market by 55 basis points per month (approximately 6% annually). (via Ellen Miller)
- Google News Archive Ends — hypothesizes that old material was “too hard” to make sense of, but that seems unlikely to me. More likely is that it wasn’t useful enough to their machine learning efforts. Newspapers can have their scanned/OCRed content for free now the program is being closed.
- Week Report 310 — BERG’s first (that I’ve seen) video report of the week, and it’s a cracker. No newsreel, just some really clever evocation of the mood of the place and the nature of the projects. I continue to be impressed by the BERG crew’s conscious creation of culture.
"video" entries
Disastrous implications of new Apple patent for blocking cellphone video
Apple has patented new technology to disable cellphone video based on external signals from public venues. Now imagine if that same technology were deployed by repressive regimes.
Checking in on HTML5 video
YouTube's Greg Schechter on HTML5's place in the video world.
HTML5 video still needs work, but YouTube's Greg Schechter says it's heading in a good direction. In this interview, Schechter explains how HTML5 video introduces new needs and new opportunities.
Four short links: 24 May 2011
Kindle List, Insider Knowledge, Google News Archive Archived, and Work Week in Video
Four short links: 11 May 2011
API Explorer, Random Sampling, Open Cultural Collections, and Video Lectures
- webshell — command-line tool for debugging/exploring APIs, open sourced (Apache v2) and written in node.js. (via Sean Coates)
- sample — command-line filter for random sampling of input. Useful when you’ve got heaps of data and want to run your algorithms on a random sample of it. (via Scott Vokes)
- Yale Offers Open Access To PD Materials in Collections — The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale’s vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available. No license will be required for the transmission of the images & no limitations imposed on their use. (via Fiona Rigby)
- Resistance to Putting Lectures Online (Sydney Morning Herald) — lecturers are worried that their off-the-cuff mistakes would be mocked on YouTube (they will be), but also that students wouldn’t attend lectures. Nobody seems to have asked whether students actually learn from lectures.
Four short links: 8 April 2011
Varnish Guide, Fields Revealed, Dev Leaderboard, and Map Documentary
- A Practical Guide to Varnish — Varnish is the http accelerator used by the discerning devops.
- Ferrofluid Sculptures (New Scientist) — hypnotic video of an iron-based fluid that is moulded by magnetic fields, which I include for no good reason than it is pretty pretty science. (via Courtney Johnston)
- Twisted Highscores List — clever leaderboard for tickets, reviews, commits, and fixes. A fun retro presentation of the information, rather than a determined effort to jolly up the grim task of software development by spraying on a thin coat of gamejuice. (via Jacob Kaplan-Moss)
- Beauty of Maps (YouTube) — BBC’s “Beauty of Maps” tv show is available in full on YouTube. Aspects of visualization and design here, as well as practical cartography. (via Flowing Data)
Pride and prejudice and book trailers
How Quirk Books puts book trailers to use and measures their success.
The literati may despise them, but book trailers can be effective marketing tools when done right. Brett Cohen, vice president of Quirk Books, discusses the production and tracking efforts behind his company's trailers.
Four short links: 6 April 2011
Timelines, Hardware Pilgrimage, Ubiquitous Play Computing, Eye-Tracking
- Timeline Setter — ProPublica-released open source tool for building timelines from spreadsheets of event data. See their post for more information. (via Laurel Ruma)
- Return to Shenzhen Part 1 — Nate from SparkFun makes a trip to component capital of the world. It’s like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for geeks. a special market that dealt exclusively with bulk cell phones. That’s right, you could buy a pile of cell phones. […] This market was truly amazing. It was one of most dense I’ve been to, shoulder to shoulder with very little standing room. Every device imaginable was available (checkout the pile of iPads) and people were literally negotiating a spot price minute by minute. The raw phones were sold for cash and then taken to other parts of the market for parts, resale, or recycling.
- Suwappu Toys in Media (BERG London) — a concept video for a toy project. This is not primarily a technology demo, it’s a video exploration of how toys and media might converge through computer vision and augmented video. We’ve used video both as a communication tool and as a material exploration of toys, animation, augmented reality and 3D worlds.
- Predator Eye-Tracking Video (YouTube) — neat technology. The source was released, retracted, reposted to GitHub by a third party, then retracted but rumours are it will be properly released soon.
Granicus opens government with streaming video
Granicus built a business helping governments get video online.
Over the past decade — and long before "open government" was a popular topic — Granicus built a sustainable business as a cloud-based platform for streaming government video.
Four short links: 21 January 2011
Sensor Trojan, node.js IDE, Quantified Conference, and P2P Streaming
- Proof-of-Concept Android Trojan Captures Spoken Credit-Card Numbers — Soundminer sits in the background and waits for a call to be placed […] the application listens out for the user entering credit card information or a PIN and silently records the information, performing the necessary analysis to turn it from a sound recording into a number. Very clever use of sensors for evil! (via Slashdot)
- Cloud9 IDE — open source IDE for node.js. I’m using it as I learn node.js, and it’s sweet as, bro.
- The Quantified Self Conference — May 28-29 in Mountain View. (via Pete Warden)
- Bram Cohen Demos P2P Streaming — the creator of BitTorrent is winding up to release a streaming protocol that is also P2P. (via Hacker News)
Four short links: 11 January 2011
Microsoft and the Web, URL Library, Optimism, and NoSQL Instruction
- Dive Into 2010 (Mark Pilgrim) — Mark wrote a hugely popular guide to HTML5 which was available online and published by O’Reilly. 6% of visitors used some version of Internet Explorer. That is not a typo. The site works fine in Internet Explorer — the site practices what it preaches, and the live examples use a variety of fallbacks for legacy browsers — so this is entirely due to the subject matter. Microsoft has completely lost the web development community.
- google-url — the Google URL-parsing library, designed to be embeddable.
- Reasons to be Cheerful (Charlie Stross) — if all we ever do is gripe about ways in which the world is not perfect, we will make ourselves miserable and fail to appreciate ways in which things are getting better. Important.
- NoSQL Tapes — videos of lectures on NoSQL topics. (via Hacker News)