- How to Build a Working Digital Computer Out of Paperclips (Evil Mad Scientist) — from a 1967 popular science book showing how to build everything from parts that you might find at a hardware store: items like paper clips, little light bulbs, thread spools, wire, screws, and switches (that can optionally be made from paper clips).
- Moloch (Github) — an open source, large scale IPv4 packet capturing (PCAP), indexing and database system with a simple web GUI.
- Offline Wikipedia Reader (Amazon) — genius, because what Wikipedia needed to be successful was to be read-only. (via BoingBoing)
- Storing and Publishing Sensor Data — rundown of apps and sites for sensor data. (via Pete Warden)
"Wikipedia" entries
Google I/O, Big Data Adolescence, Visualization, and the Future of Open Source
Weekly Highlights and Insights: May 13-17
Google I/O: O’Reilly Editor Rachel Roumeliotis reports from the conference floor.
Big Data, Cool Kids: Fumbling toward the adolescence of big data tools.
Code as Art: Interactive Data Visualization for the Web author Scott Murray on becoming a code artist.
Real-time World-wide Wikipedia Edits: Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi’s addictive visualization.
Future of Open Source: The quality, security, and community driving open source adoption.
Visualization of the Week: Real-time Wikipedia edits
The Wikipedia Recent Changes Map visualizes Wikipedia edits around the world in real-time.
Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi have put together an addictive visualization of real-time edits on Wikipedia, mapped across the world. Every time an edit is made, the user’s location and the entry they edited are listed along with a corresponding dot on the map.
Click here for the full visualization.
Read more…
Four short links: 8 May 2013
Paperclip Computing, Packet Capture, Offline Wikipedia, and Sensor Databases
Four short links: 11 March 2013
Ransom Money, High School CS, Wikipedia Links, and Social Teens
- Adventures in the Ransom Trade — between insurance, protection, and ransoms, Sean Gourley describes it as “one of the more interesting grey markets.” (via Sean Gourley)
- About High School Computer Science Teachers (Selena Deckelmann) — Selena gets an education in the state of high school computer science education.
- Learning From Big Data (Google Research) — the Wikilinks Corpus: 40 million total disambiguated mentions within over 10 million web pages […] The mentions are found by looking for links to Wikipedia pages where the anchor text of the link closely matches the title of the target Wikipedia page. If we think of each page on Wikipedia as an entity (an idea we’ve discussed before), then the anchor text can be thought of as a mention of the corresponding entity.
- Teens Have Always Gone Where Identity Isn’t — if you look back at one of the first dominant social platforms, AOL Instant Messenger, it looks a lot like the pseudonymous Tumblr and Snapchat of today in many respects. You used an avatar that was not your face. Your screenname was not indexed and not personally identifiable (mine was Goober1310).
Strata Week: Add structured data, lose local flavor?
Wikidata's structure vs. diverse knowledge, and a look at the many factors behind Netflix's recommendations.
A critic says Wikidata could undermine Wikipedia's localized information. Also, Netflix explains why its recommendation engine is much more complicated than most people realize.
Developer Week in Review: When game development met Kickstarter
From games to reference books, crowdsourcing is shaking up industries.
Crowdsourcing is changing how software development gets funded. It's also driving one of the great reference guides of the 20th century out of print.
Four short links: 16 February 2012
Wikipedia Fail, DIY Text Adventures, Antisocial Software, and Formats Matter
- The Undue Weight of Truth (Chronicle of Higher Education) — Wikipedia has become fossilized fiction because the mechanism of self-improvement is broken.
- Playfic — Andy Baio’s new site that lets you write text adventures in the browser. Great introduction to programming for language-loving kids and adults.
- Review of Alone Together (Chris McDowall) — I loved this review, its sentiments, and its presentation. Work on stuff that matters.
- Why ESRI As-Is Can’t Be Part of the Open Government Movement — data formats without broad support in open source tools are an unnecessary barrier to entry. You’re effectively letting the vendor charge for your data, which is just stupid.
Four short links: 5 December 2011
Spatial Search, Exposing Your Phone's Perfidity, School Unconference, and Wikipedia Viz
- VP Trees — a data structure for fast spatial searching. A form of nearest neighbour, useful for melodies (PDF) and image retrieval (PDF) and poetry. (via Reddit)
- iYou — iTunes plugin to show you all the stuff your phone collects about you.
- Bar Camps in Primary Schools — NZ teacher deploys bar camps among students. Great things happen.
- Realtime Wikipedia Edits — fascinating and hypnotic and inspirational and appalling and irrelevant all at once.
Four short links: 14 November 2011
Science Hack Days, YouTube Doggy Science, Antisocial Software, and Mind Reading with Wikipedia
- Science Hack Day SF Videos (justin.tv) — the demos from Science Hack Day SF. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a Hack Day.
- A Cross-Sectional Study of Canine Tail-Chasing and Human Responses to It, Using a Free Video-Sharing Website (PLoSone) — Approximately one third of tail-chasing dogs showed clinical signs, including habitual (daily or “all the time”) or perseverative (difficult to distract) performance of the behaviour. These signs were observed across diverse breeds. Clinical signs appeared virtually unrecognised by the video owners and commenting viewers; laughter was recorded in 55% of videos, encouragement in 43%, and the commonest viewer descriptors were that the behaviour was “funny” (46%) or “cute” (42%).
- RSS Died For Your Sins (Danny O’Brien) — if you have seven thousand people following you, a good six thousand of those are going to be people you don’t particularly like. The problem, as ever, is—how do you pick out the other thousand? Especially when they keep changing? I firmly believe that one of the pressing unsolved technological problems of the modern age is getting safely away from people you don’t like, without actually throttling them to death beforehand, nor somehow coming to the conclusion that they don’t exist, nor ending up turning yourself into a hateful monster.
- Generating Text from Functional Brain Images (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience) — We built a model of the mental semantic representation of concrete concepts from text data and learned to map aspects of such representation to patterns of activation in the corresponding brain image. Turns out that the clustering of concepts in Wikipedia is similar to how they’re clustered in the brain. They found clusters in Wikipedia, mapped to the brain activity for known words, and then used that mapping to find words for new images of brain activity. (via The Economist)
Publishing News: Amazon fires up B&N and BAM
An Amazon deal starts a bookseller war, content tidbits from conferences, and the application of Wikipedia's success.
In this week’s publishing news: B&N and BAM pulled DC Comics graphic novels off the shelves in a huff. Also, interesting data points surface at book conferences, and what newspapers can learn from Wikipedia.