Four short links: 14 June 2010

Open Data, Open PCR, Open Sara Winge, and Open Source Big Graph Mining

1. Learning from Libraries: the Literacy Challenge of Open Data (David Eaves) -- a powerful continuation of the theme from my Rethinking Open Data post. David observes that dumping data over the fence isn't enough, we must help citizens engage. We have a model for that help, in the form of libraries: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.
2. OpenPCR on Kickstarter -- In 1983, Kary Mullis first developed PCR, for which he later received a Nobel Prize. But the tool is still expensive, even though the technology is almost 30 years old. If computing grew at the same pace, we would all still be paying $2,000+ for a 1 MHz Apple II computer. Innovation in biotech needs a kick start!
3. Wingeing It -- profile of O'Reilly's wonderful Sara Winge by the ever fabulous Quinn Norton.
4. PEGASUS -- petascale graph mining toolkit from CMU. See their most recent publication. (via univerself on Delicious)

Four short links: 11 June 2010

Delicious Absolution, Open Data Incentives, Curious iPad, and Desktop Web Apps Again

1. Joshua at Seven on Seven -- Delicious creator Joshua Schachter participated in a Rhizome "Seven on Seven" recently. He was paired with artist Monica Narula and together they explored guilt and absolution with the help of the Mechanical Turk. Check out the presentation PDF for the quick summary.
2. How to Align Researcher Incentives with Outcomes (Cameron Neylon) -- the open science data movement battles entrenched forces for closedness. We need more sophisticated motivators than blunt policy instruments, so we arrive at metrics. [...] What might the metrics we would like to see look like? I would suggest that they should focus on what we want to see happen. We want return on the public investment, we want value for money, but above all we want to maximise the opportunity for research outputs to be used and to be useful. We want to optimise the usability and re-usability of research outputs and we want to encourage researchers to do that optimisation. Thus if our metrics are metrics of use we can drive behaviour in the right direction. It sounds good, but I have one question: I remember The Rise of Crowd Science. Alex Szalay didn't have to change researcher incentives to promote shared astronomical data. I'd ask: what can the other sciences learn from astronomy?
3. Making an iPad HTML5 App and Making it Really Fast (Thomas Fuchs) -- some curious hard-won facts about iPad web development, like that touch events are delivered faster than click events. (via Webstock newsletter)
4. Appcelerator -- open source platform for building native mobile and desktop apps with web technologies. Local filesystem access and native controls, but built with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Python, and Ruby. OS X, Linux, Blackberry, iPad, .... I've not tried it, but it may be the variation on desktop web apps whose time has come. (via ptorrsmith on Twitter)

Four short links: 7 June 2010

JS UI, Teeny Open Source Notebook, On The End of a Mobile Age, and Modern Education

1. UKI: Simple UI Kit for Complex Web Apps -- Uki is a fast and simple JavaScript user interface toolkit for desktop-like web applications. It comes with a rich view-component library ranging from Slider to List and SplitPane. Includes the now-ubiquitous Mail.app mockup, which has become to UI library webpages what the bucket of grease and dirt is to household cleaner commercials. (via Hacker News)
2. NanoNote -- USD100 minute sub-notebook computer (320x240 screen, 126g including battery, 2G storage, qwerty keyboard) with Creative Commons (attribution, sharealike) licenses on the schematics.
3. On Android Compatibility (Dan Morril) -- Rewind to about 5 years ago. [...] Back then as today, it was practically unheard of for a feature phone to ever get a software update.[...] The reason was that the smartphone platform vendors controlled the software. It was exceedingly difficult for OEMs to differentiate on software because they had little control over the software. It was difficult for them to differentiate on features because they could only ship features supported by the OS they were using. But it was still a fiercely competitive market and they still innovated as hard as they could. So they innovated on the only dimension they had control over: hardware and industrial design. [...] Think about that. Easier to rev hardware than software! A fantastically lucid explanation of the messed-up age of carrier-controlled mobile platforms that we're just leaving (and yes, we probably do have Steve Jobs to thank for that). (via Kevin Marks)
4. Living and Learning in the Cloud (EdTalks) -- talk by the deputy-principal of a New Zealand high-school that's running all open source, and has extended the "available to be improved" mindset to rooms and curriculum. (via br3nda)

Four short links: 2 June 2010

WikiLeaks Ethics, Education Business Opportunities, Corewar Updated, Watch Google IO

1. Wikileaks Launched on Stolen Documents (Wired) -- Wired claims the first set of documents was obtained by running a Tor node that users connected to ("exit node") and saving the plaintext that was sent to the users, without their knowledge. Reminds me of the adage that nothing big in Silicon Valley starts without being some degree of evil first: YouTube turning a blind eye to copyright infringement, Facebook games and spam, etc.
2. VC Investments in Education -- Cleantech investors are chasing a 3x larger market than Education and yet are putting 50-60x the money to work chasing those returns.
3. Cells: A Massively Multi-Agent Python Programming Game -- a sweet-looking update on the old Core War game.
4. Google IO 2010 Session Videos Online -- I'm keen to learn more about BigData and Prediction APIs, which seem to me an eminently sensible move by Google to play to their strengths.

Four short links: 28 May 2010

Understanding a Shuffle, Bias, Open Source a Success in Malaysia, and Guardian APIs

1. The Intuition Behind the Fisher-Yates Shuffle -- this is a simple algorithm to randomize a list of things, but most people are initially puzzled that it is more efficient than a naive shuffling algorithm. This is a nice explanation of the logic behind it.
2. Wikipedia and Inherent Open Source Bias -- a specific case of what I think of as the Firefly Principle: what happens on the Internet isn't representative of real life.
3. Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Program -- the Malaysian government is a heavy and successful user of open source.
4. Guardian's Platform Now Open for Business (GigaOm) -- elegant summary breakdown of services from the Guardian: metadata for free, content if you pay, custom APIs and applications if you pay more. I'm interested to see how well this works, given that the newspaper business is struggling to find a business model that values content.

Four short links: 27 May 2010

Big Dumps, 3D Printing Atom Movers, Faceted Browsing, and Useful Math

1. Socorro: Mozilla's Crash Reporting System (Laura Thomson) -- We receive on our peak day each week 2.5 million crash reports, and process 15% of those, for a total of 50 GB. In total, we receive around 320Gb each day. Moving to a Hadoop-based system in the future, as they're limited by database and filesystem storage.
2. DIY Atomic Force Microscopy -- use a 3D printer to make the parts so you can build a cheap and simple AFM head suitable for single molecule force spectroscopy. (via Vik Olliver)
3. Elastic Lists -- open-sourced ActionScript for a clever faceted browsing system. (via Flowing Data)
4. The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See (YouTube) -- a math lesson everyone should have. (via Hacker News)

Four short links: 26 May 2010

Reading Outlook in Open Source, Android Tablets, Websocket Editing, Jabber for Node.js

1. PSTSDK -- Apache-licensed code from Microsoft to read Outlook files. Covered by Microsoft's Open Specification Promise not to assert related patents against users of this library.
2. Cheap Android Tablet -- not multitouch, but only $136. Good for hacking with in the meantime. (via Hacker News)
3. Real-Time Collaborative Editing with Websockets, node.js, and Redis -- uses Chrome's websockets alternative to Comet and other long-polling web connections.
4. XMPP Library for Node.js -- I'm intrigued to see how quickly Node.js, the Javascript server environment, has taken off.

Four short links: 24 May 2010

Google Docs APIs, Wikileaks Founder Profile, DNA Hacking, and Abusing the Numbers

1. Google Documents API -- permissions, revisions, search, export, upload, and file. Somehow I had missed that this existed.
2. Profile of Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange (Sydney Morning Herald) -- he draws no salary, is constantly on the move, lived for a while in a compound in Nairobi with other NGOs, and cowrote the rubberhose filesystem which offers deniable encryption.
3. OpenPCR -- producing an open design for a PCR machine. PCR is how you take a single piece of DNA and make lots of copies of it. It's the first step in a lot of interesting bits of molecular biology. They're using Ponoko to print the cases. (via davetenhave on Twitter)
4. Metric Mania (NY Times) -- The problem isn’t with statistical tests themselves but with what we do before and after we run them. First, we count if we can, but counting depends a great deal on previous assumptions about categorization. Consider, for example, the number of homeless people in Philadelphia, or the number of battered women in Atlanta, or the number of suicides in Denver. Is someone homeless if he’s unemployed and living with his brother’s family temporarily? Do we require that a women self-identify as battered to count her as such? If a person starts drinking day in and day out after a cancer diagnosis and dies from acute cirrhosis, did he kill himself? The answers to such questions significantly affect the count. We can never be reminded enough that the context for data must be made as open as the data. To do otherwise is to play Russian Roulette with the truth.

Four short links: 21 May 2010

Evilbook, Design Story, Openness Rating, Web 2.0 Sharecropping

1. Infrastructures (xkcd) -- absolutely spot-on.
2. The Michel Thomas App: Behind the Scenes (BERG) -- not interesting to me because it's iPhone, but for the insight into the design process. The main goal here was for me to do just enough to describe the idea, so that Nick could take it and iterate it in code. He’d then show me what he’d built; I’d do drawings or further animations on top of it, and so on and so on. It’s a fantastic way of working. Before long, you start finishing each others’ sentences. Both of us were able to forget about distinguishing between design and code, and just get on with thinking through making together. It’s brilliant when that happens.
3. Open Government and the World Wide Web -- Tim Berners-Lee offered his "Five-Star" plan for open data. He said public information should be awarded a star rating based on the following criteria: one star for making the information public; a second is awarded if the information is machine-readable; a third star if the data is offered in a non-proprietary format; a fourth is given if it is in Linked Data format; a fifth if it has actually been linked. Not only a good rating system, but a clear example of the significantly better communication by semantic web advocates. Three years ago we'd have had a wiki specifying a ratings ontology with a union of evaluation universes reconciled through distributed trust metrics and URI-linked identity delivered through a web-services accessible RDF store, a prototype of one component of which was running on a devotee's desktop machine at a university in Bristol, written in an old version of Python. (via scilib on Twitter)
4. Data Access, Data Ownership, and Sharecropping -- With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system. Every photo, in every size, plus the completely untouched original. (which we store for you indefinitely, whether or not you pay us) Every tag, every comment, every note, every people tag, every fave. Also your stats, view counts, and referers. Not the most recent N, not a subset of the data. All of it. It’s your data, and you’ve granted us a limited license to use it. Additionally we provide a moderately competently built API that allows you to access your data at rates roughly 500x faster then the rate that will get you banned from Twitter. Asking people to accept anything else is sharecropping. It’s a bad deal. (via Marc Hedlund)

What I like about the health care technology track at the Open Source convention

The list of sessions at the Open Source convention's health care track was published this week. We found it wonderfully gratifying to get so many excellent submissions in the brief three weeks that the Request for Proposals was up. Although the credentials of the presenters cover a lot of impressive accomplishments, my own evaluation focused on how the topics fit into four overarching areas we're following at O'Reilly:

• Patient-centered records, education, and activity
• Mobile devices to collect and distribute health care information
• Administrative efficiencies, which could range from automating a manual step in a process to revising an entire workflow to eliminate wasteful activities
• The collection, processing, and display of statistics to improve health care

(continue reading)

Announcing The Emerging Languages Camp at OSCON

As new problems in computing arise, new languages are being created to help tackle those problems. We want to bring together programming language creators, researchers, and enthusiasts to share goals, experiences, and challenges. Our goal is to advance the state of the art in programming language design and implementation.

We are holding the first-ever Emerging Languages Camp Wednesday, July 21st and Thursday, July 22nd at OSCON. This is a free event. Both days will be a series of talks from the language creators. We will start each morning after the OSCON keynotes at 10:30AM. You can track our progress at https://emerginglangs.com.

Alex Payne (Twitter, Programing Scala author) and Brady Forrest (O'Reilly/Ignite) are the co-organizers. You can contact us at emerginglangs@gmail.com. We look forward to answering any questions you may have. The camp is available to all OSCON attendees while seats are available.

We are inviting the creators and maintainers of a number of relatively young programming languages, for starters. If there is anyone that you feel should attend, please let us know. Here is the current list attending language creators:

Melvin Smith - COLA
Phillip Mercurio - Thyrd
Luke Hoban - F#
Tav - PyPy
Rich Hickey - Clojure
Christopher Bertels - Fancy
Jonathan Edwards - Coherence/Subtext
Alex Eagle - Noop
Slava Pestov - Factor
Erik Meijer - C#
Wolfgang De Meuter & Tom Van Cutsem - Ambienttalk
Steve Folta - Trylon
Dan Bornstein - Dalvik
Carson Gross - Gosu
Alexander Fritze - Stratified JavaScript
Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer - Go
Steve Dekorte - Io
Charles Nutter - Duby
Matt MacLaurin - Kodu
Gilad Bracha - Newspeak
Jeremy Ashkenas - CoffeeScript
Adam Chlipala - Ur
Francisco Tolmasky - Objective-J
Jonathan Shapiro - BitC
Mark S Miller - E, Caja
Brian Rice - Slate
Walter Bright - D

Four short links: 11 May 2010

Computational Design, Instructive Games, Collaboration, and Good Bad Code

1. ToxicLibs -- an independent, open source library collection for computational design tasks with Java & Processing. (via joshua on Delicious)
2. RibbonHero -- a game for learning the new Microsoft Office. (via azaaza on Twitter)
3. Teambox -- open source project collaboration tool.
4. Google Web Security Tutorials -- the classes given to new recruits, including Jarlsberg, a bug-ridden very vulnerable demo app for would-be security gurus to fix. I like the idea of releasing antitheses, bad code that can be just as instructive as good code.

Recent Posts

• Notes from the Politics of Open Source conference | by Andy Oram on May 10, 2010
• Four short links: 7 May 2010 | by Nat Torkington on May 7, 2010
• Four short links: 4 May 2010 | by Nat Torkington on May 4, 2010
• Four short links: 30 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 30, 2010
• Four short links: 22 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 22, 2010
• Nominations Open For O'Reilly Open Source Awards 2010 | by Edd Dumbill on April 16, 2010
• Four short links: 8 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 8, 2010
• Stop fishing and start feasting: How citable public documents will change your life | by Silona Bonewald on April 7, 2010
• Four short links: 7 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 7, 2010
• Four short links: 6 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 6, 2010
• Four short links: 5 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 5, 2010
• What brand of freedom would you like? | by Marc Hedlund on April 2, 2010