Four short links: 20 November 2009

Social Network Search for Morons, Bulking Up Bio Data, Better E-Mail, Better Standards

1. Spokeo -- abysmal indictment of society, first prize in mankind's race to the bottom. Uncover personal photos, videos, and secrets ... GUARANTEED! Spokeo deep searches within 48 major social networks to find truly mouth-watering news about friends and coworkers. PS, anybody who gives their gmail username and password to a site that specializes in dishing dirt can only be described as a fucking idiot. (via Jim Stogdill, who was equally disappointed in our species)
2. Biologists rally to sequence 'neglected' microbes (Nature) -- The Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea is project to sequence genomes from more branches of the evolutionary tree of life. Eisen's team selected and sequenced more than 100 'neglected' species that lacked close relatives among the 1,000 genomes already in GenBank. The researchers reported earlier this year at the JGI's Fourth Annual User Meeting that even mapping the first 56 of these microbes' genomes increased the rate of discovery of new gene and protein families with new biological properties. It also improved the researchers' ability to predict the role of genes with unknown functions in already sequenced organisms. (via Jonathan Eisen)
3. Mail Learning: The What and the How (Simon Cozens) -- a few things that a really good mail analysis tool needs to do. I hope that my mail client and server does these out of the box in the next five years.
4. Introducing the Open Web Foundation Agreement -- The Open Web Foundation Agreement itself establishes the copyright and patent rights for a specification, ensuring that downstream consumers may freely implement and reuse the licensed specification without seeking further permission. In addition to the agreement itself, we also created an easy-to-read "Deed" that provides a high level overview of the agreement. Applying the open source approach to better standards.

Four short links: 16 November 2009

Visualizing Adventures, Droid Deployments, Fly Vision, and Mass Meat For You

1. Choose Your Own Adventure -- numerical and visual analysis of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels. The distinguishing characteristic of My Kind Of People is that they appreciate the quantitative study of the commonplace. (via Bryan O'Sullivan)
2. Tracking Droid Numbers -- uLocate, the makers of the Where app for Android, have been tracking the growth of the Droid phone using the data they get from the Android app store. (via BoyGenius Report)
3. Fly Eyes Makes Better Robot Vision -- to make smaller flying robots, researchers would like to find a simpler way of processing motion. Inspiration has come from the lowly fly, which uses just a relative handful of neurons to maneuver with extraordinary dexterity. And for more than a decade, O’Carroll and other researchers researchers have painstakingly studied the optical flight circuits of flies, measuring their cell-by-cell activity and turning evolution’s solutions into a set of computational principles. [...] Intriguingly, the algorithm doesn’t work nearly as well if any one operation is omitted. The sum is greater than the whole, and O’Carroll and Brinkworth don’t know why. Because the parameters are in constant feedback-driven flux, it produces a cascade of non-linear equations that are difficult to untangle in retrospect, and almost impossible to predict. (via Slashdot)
4. Meat Band Aids and Mass Production of Living Tissue -- Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions), that, when applied to chronic wounds (particularly nasty problems like diabetic sores), can seed healing and regeneration. This Gizmodo Q&A is informative.

Four short links: 9 November 2009

Moth Mind Readers, Shiny UI Futures, Usable Newspapers, Hardware Testing

1. A Battery-Free Implantable Neural Sensor (MIT Tech Review) -- Electrical engineers at the University of Washington have developed an implantable neural sensing chip that needs less power. Uses RFID's induction technology which means the power source can be up to a meter away. Proof of concept was implanted in a moth to sense central nervous system activity.
2. New Microsoft Interface Technology -- videos from Craig Mundie (Chief Research and Strategy Officer) on the MS Campus Tour talking about the future of UI using a sexy glass prototype that features tablet PC, gesture, speech recognition, and even eye tracking. Lustable.
3. Adding Usability to Print -- detailed description of a failed pitch to reinvent a newspaper, to bring web sensibility to print. Make the paper more usable, think cross media instead of separate media, while using the strength of the paper (pictures, info graphics, nice text) to the max… Make a product that people want to buy because it is more usable that the competitor, not because it wins graphic design prizes. (via Evolving Newsroom)
4. StressAppTest -- Google-created open source project to pound the living crap out of hardware by maximising random traffic to memory from processor and I/O, with the intent of creating a realistic high load situation in order to test the existing hardware devices in a computer.

Four short links: 16 October 2009

Audio Geotagging, SF Open Data Stories, Wave Use Cases, Hadooped Genomes

1. Wiimote Audio Geotagging -- match audio with the map movement and annotations made with an IR pen and a Wiimote. Very cool! (and from New Zealand)
2. San Francisco: Open For Data -- Two months after it launched, the project is already reaping rewards from San Francisco's huge community of programmers. Applications using the data include Routesy, which offers directions based on real-time city transport feeds; and EcoFinder, which points you to the nearest recycling site for a given item.
3. Google Wave's Best Use Cases (Lifehacker) -- not cases where people are using Wave, but where they want to. Read this as "the Web has not provided all the tools to solve these problems". Something will solve them, and Wave is trying to. (via Jim Stogdill)
4. Analyzing Human Genomes with Hadoop -- case study from the Cloudera blog. Performs alignment and genotyping on the 100GB of data you get when you sequence a human's genome in about three hours for less than $100 using a 40-node, 320-core cluster rented from Amazon’s EC2. (via mndoci on Twitter)

Four short links: 4 August 2009

NASA Cloudware, btrfs, eBook Editing, Exponential Death

1. NASA Nebula Services/Platform Stack -- The NEBULA platform offers a turnkey Software-as-a-Service experience that can rapidly address the requirements of a large number of projects. However, each component of the NEBULA platform is also available individually; thus, NEBULA can also serve in Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service capacities. Bundles RabbitMQ, Eucalyptus, LUSTRE storage, Fabric deployment, Varnish front-end, MySQL and more. (via Jim Stogdill)
2. A Short History of btrfs -- Now for some personal predictions (based purely on public information - I don't have any insider knowledge). Btrfs will be the default file system on Linux within two years. Btrfs as a project won't (and can't, at this point) be canceled by Oracle. If all the intellectual property issues are worked out (a big if), ZFS will be ported to Linux, but it will have less than a few percent of the installed base of btrfs. Check back in two years and see if I got any of these predictions right!
3. Sigil -- open source WYSIWYG eBook editor. (via liza on Twitter)
4. Exponential Decay of Life -- This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. (via Hacker News)

Four short links: 29 July 2009

1. Bioweathermap -- crowdsourcing the gathering of environmental samples for DNA sequencing to study the changing distribution of microbial life. Another George Church project. (via timoreilly at Twitter)
2. We Are All African Now -- a great article about our genetic history and the computational genomics that makes it possible. (via Tim Bray)
3. Standing Out In The Crowd -- OSCON keynote by Kirrily Robert on women in open source. Excellent.
4. Energy Harvesting Powers Printed LED -- an interesting combination of two emerging technologies. Like an RFID, the circuit has a current induced by the presence of a changing RF field. The EL display and the RFID circuit are printed in organic compounds, whereas the power control is built with traditional circuit fabrication techniques. (via Freaklabs)