Four short links: 28 May 2009

Mobile Viruses, Open Data, Twitter Bookmarks, Sexy Geek Skills

1. Viral Epidemics Poised to go Mobile -- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (author of Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else) modelled mobile phone virus epidemiology for NSF and concluded that (in accordance with experience) no single OS has critical mass for viruses to break-out. I wonder: will Android or iPhone reach that point first? (via ACM TechNews)
2. Socrata -- formerly "Blist", the first of what will undoubtedly be many startups "refocusing" attempting to profit from the new US administration's fondness for Web 2.0. The business model, however, is "we'll offer your data to citizens in a useful form" and it seems to me that this is a responsibility that Government should embrace rather than outsource. (via Jesse)
3. Tag This -- tweet @tagthis with a link and keywords to post the link as bookmark in your Delicious/Magnolia account.
4. Three Sexy Skills of Geeks -- statistics, data munging, and visualization. I'm reading Visualizing Data right now and expect the universe to bury me in bootie before the day is out. "Processing: it's cheaper than couple's therapy and you can post pictures of it on the Internet without being fired." (via mattb on Twitter)

Four short links: 27 May 2009

Hacker Browser, Design and Engineering, Twitter Data, Fire Eagle Updater for OS X

1. uzbl -- lightweight WebKit-based web browser controlled with vim-like keystrokes, controllable through a FIFO for scripting, and all the "features" (bookmarking, history, changing URL) happen through external scripts. For the hardcore. (via joshua on delicious)
2. A Conversation With Eric Rodenbeck About Usefully Cool Design and Engineering (Jon Udell) -- if we could only distil Stamen down to their barest essence, we could make a fortune selling it on the black market ...
3. Twitter Data -- using Twitter as a conduit for messages that have semantic markup. My gut reaction is that I'd prefer pure JSON in the data tweets, because a hybrid gives you poor use of the limited bandwidth and there seems no strong reason to care about human readability. (via Ted Leung)
4. Clarke -- elegant OS X updater for Fire Eagle that uses Skyhook to determine your location.

Four short links: 26 May 2009

Databases, Sensors, Visualization, and Patents

1. Flare -- dynamically partitioning and reconstructing key-value server. Currently built on Tokyo Cabinet, but backend is theoretically pluggable. (via joshua on delicious)
2. Implantable Device Offers Continuous Cancer Monitoring -- the sensor network begins to extend into our bodies. The cylindrical, 5-millimeter implant contains magnetic nanoparticles coated with antibodies specific to the target molecules. Target molecules enter the implant through a semipermeable membrane, bind to the particles and cause them to clump together. That clumping can be detected by MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The device is made of a polymer called polyethylene, which is commonly used in orthopedic implants. The semipermeable membrane, which allows target molecules to enter but keeps the magnetic nanoparticles trapped inside, is made of polycarbonate, a compound used in many plastics. (via FreakLabs)
3. Visualizing Data source -- the source code to examples in Visualizing Data.
4. The First Software Patent (Wired) -- was issued on this day in 1981, for a complex full-text storage and retrieval system. Tellingly, business strategy of the owner of the first software patent was ... to become a patent lawyer. A day that will linger in irritation, if not live in infamy. (via glynmoody on Twitter)

The Myth of Macroinnovation

An idea is making the rounds and appearing in articles like this New York Times piece, and it goes roughly thus: the age of the small inventor is over because to work on stuff that matters requires the largescale coordination of people and materiel that only governments and large corporations can provide. This notion that we're entering a Golden Age of Macroinnovation is bunkum, I'm happy to report.

Scale matters, scale has always mattered, but scaling is not innovating. It's true that there are many opportunities for businesses and governments to do big things. That's always true—all my friends who worked at Yahoo! and Microsoft said one of the attractions was the ability to write code that would be used by hundreds of millions of people. However, the article basically says, "large institutions are tackling large problems." That's wonderful news, much better than large institutions ignoring large problems, but has nothing to do with innovation.

Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps scaling is a form of innovation. Innovation is characterised by disruption and the unknown. Think of those governments and large corporations and ask yourself: are these the birthplaces of radical thinking, new ways of getting things done, and risk-taking leaps into the unknown? Of course not. Governments are the most risk-averse institutions in the world, more so than medicine where lives hang in the balance—doctors at least listen to evidence, whereas the definition of bureaucracy is "we follow the rules regardless of reality". Governments exist to preserve the status quo that elected them, not disrupt it.

Don't go hoping for a change in government's risk aversion any time soon. Every penny is spent knowing that to fail means to be vilified for "squandering public money". Doing something new risks failure. Like a puppy that has been harshly house-broken, Government associates failure with pain and so responds with fear, hostility, and concealment. With that mindset you can never learn from failure, and so unless you luckily get it right first time you'll find your Government road to delivering something new to be harsh, difficult, and largely untrodden.

Do you think things are different now? Consider Obama's billions on health record rollout. KP have a model EHR system, "KP HealthConnect". It cost $4B and took five years to buy and roll it out. This is KP's second go at it: in 2002 they wrote off $770M they'd spent with IBM trying to build their own EHR system. Do you think that the Obama Administration will get a second chance if his first attempt at EHRs loses $770M?

Big businesses aren't much different: a large company is a small Government that has more flexibility on HR. The profit focus of a business is a help and a hindrance as Innovator's Dilemma so clearly showed. The NY Times piece quotes Clayton Christensen saying, "The good news is that, once they recognize the benefits of disruptive thinking, the big companies have all the resources necessary to induce change.”

My experience with large companies and governments shows me that it is not a simple or trivial matter to recognize the benefits or marshal the resources. A common failure mode is where the leadership say they want disruption and innovation, the grass roots want it, but the middle management tiers aren't incentivised to deliver it because their bonuses are tied to metrics on existing product lines. Disruption eats into existing businesses. "Maximizing Shareholder Value" is a wonderful focusing device but, without an explicit timeframe for that value, innovation risks shareholder lawsuits for sabotaging profitability.

In his delicious.com comment on the NY Times piece, Michal Migurski observed, "New New Deal is at heart a massive, all-fronts realignment—where's the role for the small and the nimble in this universe?". It is premature to declare Mission Accomplished for reinvention of Government (see the Government 1.5 meme). At its heart, this is an attempt to get Government to use the Web 2.0 tools we built in the last decade ... tools that were largely the product of one or two people. I don't see bureaucrats using decade-old tools as an "innovation" that the small and nimble have to worry about.

I love that governments, NGOs, businesses, and citizens are going to be tackling large and meaningful problems with the aid of the tools and techniques developed by researchers, entrepreneurs, and hackers around the world. But to mistake using those techniques for inventing them is to ignore that great lesson of Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Four short links: 25 May 2009

1. China is Logging On -- blogging 5x more popular in China than in USA, email 1/3 again as popular in USA as China. These figures are per-capita of Internet users, and make eye-opening reading. (via Glyn Moody)
2. The Economics of Google (Wired) -- the money graf is Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its various business units. Since moving a product's storage and computation to a new data center is disruptive, engineers often put it off. "I suggested we run an auction similar to what the airlines do when they oversell a flight. They keep offering bigger vouchers until enough customers give up their seats," Varian says. "In our case, we offer more machines in exchange for moving to new servers. One group might do it for 50 new ones, another for 100, and another won't move unless we give them 300. So we give them to the lowest bidder—they get their extra capacity, and we get computation shifted to the new data center."
3. Why Washington Doesn't Get New Media -- Things eventually improved, but despite the stunning advances in communications technology, most of federal Washington has still failed to grasp the meaning of Government 2.0. Indeed, much is mired in Government 1.5. Government 1.5? That’s a term of art for the vast virtual ecosystem taking root in Washington that has set up the trappings of 2.0 — the blogs, the Facebook pages, the Twitter accounts — but lacks any intellectual heartbeat. Too many aides in official Washington are setting up blogs and social media pages because they understand that is what they are supposed to do. All the while, many are sweating the possibility that they might actually have to say something substantive or engage the public directly. It is the nature of midlevel know-nothings to grinfuck any idea that would force them to substantially change their behaviour. We incentivize this when we talk about "you must have a blog" (ok, I'll get comms to write it), or "put up a wiki for this" (ok, but there'll be no moderation so it'll be ignorable chaos). Describe the behaviour you want and not a tool that might produce it. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. On the Information Armageddon (Mind Hacks) -- Vaughn points out that the much-linked-to New York Magazine article on attention is a crock. I didn't like it because it was wordy and self-indulgent, Vaughn because it didn't actually cite any studies other than one which was described incorrectly. History has taught us that we worry about widespread new technology and this is usually expressed in society in terms of its negative impact on our minds and social relationships. If you're really concerned about cognitive abilities, look after your cardiovascular health (eat well and exercise), cherish your relationships, stay mentally active and experience diverse and interesting things. All of which have been shown to maintain mental function, especially as we age.

Four short links: 22 May 2009

Villainous Javascript, Funding the Arts, Peak Web, and Crowdsourced Quality Control at a Museum

1. Hiding Dirty Deeds: "Encrypted" Client-Side Code -- obfuscated Javascript from a Facebook phishing site, deconstructed and reconstructed, parsed and glossed for understanding. It reminds me of the best obfuscated Perl: Latin, string substitution, runtime and compile-time semantics ... a work of evil art. (via waxy)
2. Kickstarter -- artistic commercial version of PledgeBank. You say "I want to do [X] by Y and it takes $Z" and people can donate to your goal. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
3. Peak Web (Chris Heathcote) -- My biggest problem is that people always perceive the near-past, present and near-future as having the most technological change, and the speed of decline of the old new media feels wrong. I am, however, thinking that there’s something true in one reading of the graph: we may be at or past Peak Web.
4. Crowdsourcing the Cleanup with Freeze Tag -- The Awe-Worthy Brooklyn Museum, like all cultural institutions, have more objects than they can add metadata to. They let users provide metadata through tagging, but all crowdsourcing projects permit vandals. Their solution: crowdsource the cleanup. My only question is whether this will become a game between vandals and janitors. Brooklyn Museum is noteworthy for their insanely great use of the web, check them out and please support them if you like what you see.

Warning sign of peak web

Four short links: 21 May 2009

1. Us Now -- UK documentary, available streaming or on DVD, about how open government and digital democracy makes sense. It's good to watch if you've not thought about how government could be positively changed by technology, but I don't think it's radical enough in the future it describes.
2. It's Gonna Be The Future Soon -- great video for the Jonathan Coulton song that's the Radar theme song, my theme song, and probably works well as an anthem for most of us goofy future-loving freaks. Taken from the DVD of a live show. (via BoingBoing)
3. Jetpack -- Mozilla Labs' new extension system. Mozilla Labs is building quite the assemblage of interesting hack tools, and it's interesting how significantly they're aimed at the developer and encouraging lots of add-ons and after-market extensions for the browser. I wonder whether this is a deliberate strategy ("community will beat off Chrome!") or whether it's a simple consequence of the fact that Mozilla is a developer organisation.
4. Sci Bar Camp -- Science topics, Palo Alto, 7 July 2009.

Four short links: 20 May 2009

Cognitive Surplus, Data Centers=Mainframes, Django Microframework, and a Visit To The Future

1. Distributed Proofreaders Celebrates 15000th Title Posted To Project Gutenberg -- a great use of our collective intelligence and cognitive surplus. If I say one more Clay Shirkyism, someone's gonna call BINGO. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
2. Datacenter is the New Mainframe (Greg Linden) -- wrapup of a Google paper that looks at datacenters in the terms of mainframes: time-sharing, scheduling, renting compute cycles, etc. I love the subtitle, "An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines".
3. djng, a Django powered microframework -- update from Simon Willison about the new take on Django he's building. Microframeworks let you build an entire web application in a single file, usually with only one import statement. They are becoming increasingly popular for building small, self-contained applications that perform only one task—Service Oriented Architecture reborn as a combination of the Unix development philosophy and RESTful API design. I first saw this idea expressed in code by Anders Pearson and Ian Bicking back in 2005.
4. Cute! (Dan Meyer) -- photo from Dan Meyer's classroom showing normal highschool students doing something that I assumed only geeks at conferences did. I love living in the future for all the little surprises like this.

Four short links: 19 May 2009

Recession Map, Gaming Psychology, Charging For Unwanted Content, and Two Great Projects

1. Economic Stress Map Outlines Recession's Stories (AP) -- The Stress Index synthesizes three complex sets of ever-evolving data. By factoring in monthly numbers for foreclosure, bankruptcy and most painfully unemployment, the AP has assembled a numeral that reflects the comparative pain each American county is feeling during these dark economic days. Fascinating view of the country, and I wish I had one for New Zealand.
2. Handed Keys to Kingdom, Gamers Race to Bottom (Wired) -- Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early. Not only a lesson for creators of user-generated content sites, but also for students of human nature: if you provide a number, some people will act to maximize that number come what may. See also friend counts on social networks. (via jasonwryan on Twitter)
3. San Jose Mercury News to Charge For Online Content -- congratulations to the SJMN for trying something, my regrets that it's this. This business model didn't fail in 1998 because there weren't enough people on the Internet, it failed for the same reason it will fail now: you have a generic product and a cheaper substitute will win.
4. Two Groundbreaking Open Source Projects -- two open source projects that are developing software in very different ways (one with centralised authority, one more distributed), large (60k and 200k+ LOC), in some cases teaching people to code from scratch, with a wonderful vibe and solid outputs. I was stunned and delighted at the OTW’s process for choosing a programming language for the Archive. In the Livejournal post, Python vs Ruby deathmatch!, they asked non-programmers to read up on either language and then write a short “Choose your own adventure” program. {The trick is that we would like you to try writing this program with no help from any programmers or coders. DO feel free to help each other out in the comments, ask your flist for help (as long as you say “no coders answer!”), or to Google for other help or ideas-in fact, if you find a different tutorial or book out there which you think is better than the ones below, we really want to hear about it.} There were 74 comments in reply, and the results — 150 volunteers on the project, many of whom had never programmed before — speak for themselves. It makes me realize how much of the macho meritocracy "it's just about how GOOD YOU ARE" individual-excellence cocks-out culture in programming in general and open source in particular isn't about what's necessary to make good programs and good programmers, it's what's necessary to make great egos feel good about themselves.

Four short links: 18 May 2009

Scientists, Scammers, Satellites, and Safe Havens

1. Scientists Without Borders -- "Mobilizing Science, Improving Lives". mobilize and coordinate science-based activities that improve quality of life in the developing world. The research community, aid agencies, NGOs, public-private partnerships, and a wide variety of other institutions are already promoting areas such as global health, agricultural progress, and environmental well-being, but current communication gaps restrict their power. Organizations and individuals do not always know about one another's endeavors, needs, or availability, which limits the ability to forge meaningful connections and harness resources. This situation is especially striking in light of the growing realization that integrated rather than focused approaches are crucial for addressing key challenges such as extreme poverty and the glaring health problems that accompany it. See also Geeks Without Borders, but is there anyone running a program that sends geeks into the field where they're needed? I know a lot of open source folks who have been volunteering around the world in poor nations, but I haven't found a site that coordinates this. Can anyone point me to such a thing?
2. The Psychology of Being Scammed -- UK government report into the psychology of scammers' victims. Lots of insights into successful scams (parallels drawn to finance or startups left as exercise to reader) and some counter-intuitive findings like Scam victims often have better than average background knowledge in the area of the scam content. For example, it seems that people with experience of playing legitimate prize draws and lotteries are more likely to fall for a scam in this area than people with less knowledge and experience in this field. This also applies to those with some knowledge of investments. Such knowledge can increase rather than decrease the risk of becoming a victim. (via Mind Hacks)
3. GPS Accuracy Could Start Dropping In 2010 (Tidbits) -- the Air Force has had difficulty launching new satellites. The GAO has calculated - using reliability curves for each operational satellite - that the probability of keeping a 24-satellite constellation in orbit drops below 95 percent in 2010, and could drop as low as 80 percent in 2011 and 2012. (via geowanking)
4. Open Database Alliance -- an attempt to provide a safe home for MySQL given the Oracle acquisition of Sun. [...] a vendor-neutral consortium designed to become the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other enhancements for the MySQL community and partner ecosystem. The Open Database Alliance will comprise a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.

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