Four short links: 20 August 2010

Case Study, Promise Transparency, Scriptable Browsing, Open Science Data Success

1. Case Study: Slideshare Goes Freemium (Startup Lessons Learned) -- I love case studies, they're the best part of every business degree. The MVPs were tricky to implement for emotional reasons, too. Because the SlideShare team was used to giving away a high-value product, engineers balked at charging for a clearly imperfect product. The analytics package, for instance, launched in what Sinha calls “a very crude version; we started off and sold it before we were comfortable with it."
2. Guardian's Pledge Tracker -- keeping track of the pledges and promises from the new UK government. (via niemanlab)
3. luakit browser framework -- script WebKit using Lua. (via ivanristic)
4. Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimers (New York Times) -- The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world. No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

The software behind the VA health care transformation

A review of Phillip Longman's book "Best Care Anywhere."

Phillip Longman's book "Best Care Anywhere," just released in its second edition, had a strong effect on me that cascaded off of several other experiences and encounters I've had recently. The material should have been more familiar to me. The Department of Veterans Affairs' quality efforts have become health care industry buzz, and its illustrious VistA software has also often made the news, a couple times for its near-death experiences. But VistA is still not the subject of daily discussion in American public life.

I'm beginning to think our blind spot about the VA and VistA comes from the sheer magnitude of the whole achievement. Longman's modest-length book is just an introduction to the swirling mass of issues that come with this topic: what VA's quality program has to say about health care, about business motivations, about government, about software development, even about ordinary people and how they handle the most important aspects of their own lives.

There's just too much there for us to absorb, and the lessons of VistA force us to relinquish too many prejudices. I'm beginning to make the necessary shift to understanding VistA after talking to doctors, hearing from the people porting it to new environments, and now reading Longman's book. For other people without so many contacts in the health care field, his book is a good start. Don't expect it to answer all your questions, but just to make you uncomfortable enough to change the way you think -- and act.

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Four short links: 19 August 2010

Satellite-based Forecasting, Design Book, Submarine Cable Map, Brain Science

1. New Big Brother: Market-Moving Satellite Images -- using satellite images of Wal-Mart and Target parking lots to predict quarterly returns. (via Hacker News)
2. Form and Code -- beautiful book on the intersection of code, design, architecture, form, and function. One of the authors is Casey Reas who was also one of the people behind Processing. (via RandomEtc on Twitter)
3. Cable Map -- major underwater communications cables around the world. (via berkun on Twitter)
4. Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand The Brain (Pharyngula) -- To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it's the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism. He doesn't even comprehend the nature of the problem, and here he is pontificating on magic solutions completely free of facts and reason.

Facebook Places plays nice with Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah

Facebook just launched Places for the United States. In short, it is a location check-in platform. They launched with four partners (Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah) all of whom are federating check-ins in some way. The Places API is currently read-only, while the Write & Search API are in closed beta.

Facebook Places was created with three goals:

1. Helping people share where they are
2. Seeing who else is around you
3. Seeing what's going on around you

The launch will be available via a new iPhone app and the Facebook mobile site (requires a browser with HTML5 and geolocation). From these apps you can check yourself into a location, create a new place ,and check-in friends. Every Place has a "People Here Now" section where you can see who else is at a location during a particular time window.

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Linked data is opening 800 years of UK legal info

The new legislation.gov.uk site brings the semantic web into government.

Earlier this month, the National Archives of the United Kingdom launched legislation.gov.uk to provide public access to a primary source of legal information for citizens. Legislation.gov.uk covers more than 800 years of legal history in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

When I heard about the new site, I dialed up John Sheridan (@johnlsheridan), head of e-services and strategy at the UK's National Archives, to talk about its implications for open government. Our conversation is embedded as a podcast in this post.

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The laws of information chemistry

Data will flow and recombine, or not, according to principles we teach.

In the course of my work on the elmcity project I've talked to a lot of people about forming networks of calendars. One of the major hurdles has been the very idea that we can form such networks, in an ad-hoc way, using informal contracts. Later in this series I'll explore why that's a tough concept, and mull over how we might soften it up. Here I'll focus on an even more basic conceptual stumbling block: information structure.

Everybody learns that things in the physical world are structured in ways that govern how they can or cannot interact. Whether it's proteins folded into biochemical locks and keys, or metallic parts formed into real locks and keys, we know the drill. The right shape will open the door, the wrong one won't. You can't get through grade school without being exposed to that idea.

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Thousands of workers are standing by

CrowdFlower's Lukas Biewald on the repercussions of crowdsourced work and the state of human-machine relations.

Labor isn't what it used to be. Where in past years the expectation was that jobs were done at a certain place and time, now there are entire swaths of work that can be accomplished by anyone, anywhere.

Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower and a speaker at next month's Web 2.0 Expo in New York, is at the center of the labor shift. His company has found an interesting way to tap Internet-connected groups to get work done -- think Mechanical Turk, but with additional tech and quality-assurance layers added on. What's really surprising is that many of the groups CrowdFlower turns to would never define themselves as formal workforces.

Biewald covers a variety of topics in the full interview, including:

• He sees similarities between "labor on demand" and cloud computing: both keep costs down and reduce the risks associated with scale.
• "It’s hard to explain my business to my mother," Biewald says. In the interview, he digs into CrowdFlower's unusual -- and somewhat complicated -- business model.
• He provides further proof that virtual currency is a big deal: Around half of CrowdFlower's work involves it in some fashion.
• He acknowledges that distributed work has a disruptive and negative affect on many businesses. However, Biewald believes it's a "rising tide" that will "increase the GDP of the world."

Read more after the jump.

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Four short links: 18 August 2010

Place Context, iPod Hardware, Mobile Cognitive Surplus, and Music Hacking APIs

1. BBC Dimensions -- brilliant work, a fun site that lets you overlay familiar plcaes with famous and notable things so you can get a better sense of how large they are. Example: the Colossus of Rhodes straddling O'Reilly HQ, the Library of Alexandria vs the Google campus, and New Orleans Mardi Gras began at the headquarters of Fred Phelps's Westboro Baptist Church. (via this piece about its background)
2. Podapter -- simple plug that takes mini-USB and goes into an iPod or iPhone. (via Tuesday product awesomeness)
3. New NexusOne Radio Firmware -- a glimpse of the world that's sprung up sharing the latest goodies between countries, carriers, and developers. For everyone for whose products the street has found a new use, the challenge is to harness this energy, enthusiasm, knowledge, and devotion. In terms of cognitive surplus, this far exceeds the 1 LOLCAT minimum standard unit. (via YuweiWang on Twitter)
4. Echoes Nest Remix API -- access to database of song characteristics and tools to manipulate tunes. See the Technology Review article for examples of what it's capable of. (via aaronsw on Twitter)

Tracking the tech that will make government better

Crowdsourcing, fraud detection, and open data tools were touted at a recent Senate hearing.

Will crowdsourcing and next-generation data mining tools enable the federal government to find innovative solutions to grand challenges and reduce fraud?

Last week, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security held a hearing on "Transforming Government Through Innovative Tools and Technology" that looked at the potential for technology to improve government transparency and accountability. The first part of the hearing featured testimony from Daniel Werfel, controller of the Office of Federal Financial Management within the Office of Management and Budget, and Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB). You can view their written testimony and archived webcast at Senate.gov.

Riley Crane, a post-doc at the Media Laboratory Human Dynamics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared one of the most successful examples of crowdsourcing in history: the strategy that led to the MIT balloon team's victory in the DARPA Network Challenge.

"For the first time, we can bridge the gap between online and the real world," testified Crane. A challenge "thought impossible by the intelligence community using traditional techniques" was solved in 8 hours and 52 minutes, said Crane. "We leveraged the problem-solving capabilities of the participants," said Crane, and "built the infrastructure that allowed others to solve the problem for us." As Brian Ahier pointed out on his blog on healthcare IT, Crane praised Tim O'Reilly's "government as a platform" concept and Gov 2.0 principles in his Senate testimony:

More on the potential of crowdsourcing and how open data analysis is improving fraud detection after the jump.

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On re-reading Steven Levy's "Hackers"

Why the "Hackers" thesis still holds. Plus: How hyperlinks created new context in the ebook edition.

When O'Reilly Media bought the rights to "Hackers" for its 25th Anniversary re-release, we knew this classic needed no gilding. The characters are just as astonishing, the anecdotes as gripping, the analysis as pertinent as when the book was released in 1984. O'Reilly publisher Dale Dougherty recently conducted a video interview with "Hackers" author Steven Levy about the book.

Nevertheless, spiffing it up for the ebook version has paid off by delivering a new dimension to the book that readers are reporting back on favorably. After I offer my reactions to re-reading the text after 25 years -- stronger reactions than I had expected -- I'll finish with a discussion of the links we added to the electronic version.

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Four short links: 17 August 2010

Stemming Demo, Mapping Service, Value of Data, and The Magic of the Valley

1. Demo of Stemming Algorithms -- type in text and see what it looks like when stemmed with different algorithms provided by NLTK. (via zelandiya on Twitter)
2. Crowdmap -- hosted Ushahidi. (via dvansickle on Twitter)
3. Opinions vs Data -- talks about the usability of a new gmail UI element, but notable for this quote from Jakob Nielsen: In my two examples, the probability of making the right design decision was vastly improved when given the tiniest amount of empirical data. (via mcannonbrookes on Twitter)
4. The Next Silicon Valley -- long and detailed list of the many forces contributing to Silicon Valley's success as tech hub, arguing that the valley's position is path-dependent and can simply be grown ab initio in some aspiring nation's co-prosperity zone of policy whim. (via imran and timoreilly on Twitter)

Stepping it up with Transit Score

Where you live has a huge impact on how much you drive. If your neighborhood has easy access to public transportation or there are a lot of amenities nearby, you can walk more and drive less (thus saving money while getting a little exercise). Front Seat's Walk Score has become a well-known metric for determining a place's walkability (Radar post). However, this only told a fraction of the story. How walkable a place tells you very little about the public transportation options. Today Front Seat is releasing Transit Score, a measure of how accessible public transportation is at a given location, and Commute Reports, that let you determine your commuting options.

To use Transit Score, just search for a location on the WalkScore site. Below the map (that shows all of the local amenities) you'll find your overall score. So the neighborhood of Capitol Hill in Seattle has a great Walk Score of 95 and an iffyTransit score of 71.

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Recent Posts

• Geeks at work | by Mac Slocum on August 16, 2010
• Four short links: 16 August 2010 | by Nat Torkington on August 16, 2010
• Open source givers and takers | by Mike Loukides on August 13, 2010
• Four short links: 13 August 2010 | by Nat Torkington on August 13, 2010
• Watson, Turing, and extreme machine learning | by Mike Loukides on August 12, 2010
• Four short links: 12 August 2010 | by Nat Torkington on August 12, 2010
• Wacky Google/Verizon net neutrality theory | by Marc Hedlund on August 11, 2010
• Hearing those digital cries for help | by Alex Howard on August 11, 2010
• What I get and don't get about the Google/Verizon proposal | by Andy Oram on August 11, 2010
• How to fix online advertising | by Mac Slocum on August 11, 2010
• The power of informal contracts | by Jon Udell on August 11, 2010
• Four short links: 11 August 2010 | by Nat Torkington on August 11, 2010