Four short links: 9 September 2009

SMS Data Collection, Love of Math, Anti-File Sharing Rubbish, Open Manufacturing

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 4

1. RapidSMS -- a free and open-source framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology. UNICEF's mobile data collection framework, as used in Malawi and other proving grounds. (via gov2expo)
2. Groceries -- read this and you will realize that Dan Meyer is the math teacher you wish you'd had. He has the geek nature, and his excitement must be great for his students. The express lane isn't faster. The manager backed me up on this one. You attract more people holding fewer total items, but as the data shows above, when you add one person to the line, you're adding 48 extra seconds to the line length (that's "tender time" added to "other time") without even considering the items in her cart. Meanwhile, an extra item only costs you an extra 2.8 seconds. Therefore, you'd rather add 17 more items to the line than one extra person! I can't believe I'm dropping exclamation points in an essay on grocery shopping but that's how this stuff makes me feel.
3. How the UK Government Spun 136 People into 7 Million -- a radio show looked into the government's claim of 7 million illegal filesharers and discovered it came down to 136 people in a survey admitting they'd used it. (via br3nda)
4. Idle Speculation on the shan zhai and Open Fabrication (Tom Igoe) -- shan zhai have established a culture of sharing information about the things they make through open BOMs (bills of materials) and other design materials, crediting each other with improvements. The community apparently self-polices this policy, and ostracizes those that violate it. Open hardware, business, recovery, and more in this fascinating speculation.

Four short links: 30 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

A great free book, dead newspaper dig, movie Torrent wakeup, and money from free:

1. Digital Foundations with Adobe Illustrator -- CC-licensed book that gets you started using Adobe Illustrator. I'm loving it, and I have the artistic ability of a particularly philistine rock. See also their advice to authors on how to negotiate a Creative Commons license. (via bjepson's delicious stream)
2. How to Become a Death Of Newspapers Blogger -- tongue-in-cheek dig at the recent imminent deaths of newspapers being predicted. Point taken about how unproductive these are: The point's not to fix anything. It's to describe the problem more dramatically than the next guy. If Steve Outing says newspapers have a "death spiral" and Clay Shirky predicts "a bloodbath," the point goes to Shirky. Basically, imagine a group of people watching a building burn down and bickering amongst themselves about whether it's a conflagration or an inferno. It's like that, but with consulting fees. (via migurski's delicious stream)
3. BarTor, Android BitTorrent with a Twist -- take a picture of a DVD's barcode, it looks up the movie, and sends the torrent file to your desktop to be automatically downloaded. NetFlix should have a legit form of this. If iTunes Movie Store had it, you could have racks of "DVDs" in stores that you could browse and snap to "buy" (giving a cut to the store). This feels monumental.
4. Survey of Free Business Models Online -- an interesting breakdown of ways to make money from "free" on the web. (via glynn moody)

Four short links: 10 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation Sets Up Its Own BitTorrent Tracker -- the money shot is not that they're using the same code as Pirate Bay, it's "By using BitTorrent we can reach our audience with full quality media files. Experience from our early tests show that if we’re the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it.". Finally, a broadcaster realizing that they have to jump into the conversation with customers even though they don't know how it ends. (via BoingBoing)
2. Sita Sings The Blues Released -- release of the movie that was mired in copyright strife, now freed under Creative Commons Attribute And No Damn DRM licensing. It still is copyright-entangled: some of the songs in the movie are restricted and if you want to reuse the songs in your reuse of the movie then you'll have to wrangle with the copyright overlords.
3. Crisis of Credit Explained in Infographics -- a great 10m movie explaining the whole disaster from cash to crash, with an infographic-meets-Flash-game feel to it. This is the future of educational films. I've embedded it below. (via Flowing Data)
4. Cowpox Smallpox -- very clear essay from Maciej Ceglowski about how the economic dramas and the climate dramas challenge our democracy in the same way. You might know Maciej from Argentina on two steaks a day or Dabblers and Blowhards. Complexity as a result of feedback loops caught my eye, as that's part of the talk I gave at Webstock, "Better Stronger Failures": "Feedback loops in the financial world are even worse, since the entities being modeled are aware of their behavior - and aware of the models being used to study them. Investors form strategies based not just on market conditions, but on their perceptions of others' perceptions of market conditions, and so on in a hall of mirrors effect. Any algorithm that can reliably predict the behavior of a financial market will be used by participants in that market to earn money, altering the system in a way that leaves you right back where you started. In this sense our ability to model economics will always be worse than our understanding of the weather, since we don't have to worry about a raindrop anticipating that it will hit the ground before it even forms, and taking steps to change the outcome."

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Four short links: 10 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

Here are four fun links to set the tone for your weekend: high risk money, productive failure, consumer-grade BitTorrent, and architecture criticism for the rest of us.

1. How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing -- perhaps "hack" is a little excessive, but it's a readable short account of how Porsche made a lot of money playing "millionaire's poker" against hedge funds. (via Ivan Krstić, the author of Apache Security former Director of Security Architecture for the OLPC)
2. Missteps in Django -- a Python programmer documents the mistakes he makes programming in Django. This helps other people as they face similar problems, and shows the Django developers where their expectations differ from those of mortal programmers. I think it's a great idea because it makes visible the useful mistakes that are how we learn. It also reinforces the idea that it's okay to make mistakes, we all do it, and they're as worth of discussion as successes.
3. Netgear Unveils TV Torrent Player -- consumer device with BitTorrent built in. The easier it becomes for mortals to get files through BitTorrent, the harder it is to ignore unauthorised file sharing through BitTorrent, and the more pressing a solution to the business problem will be. (via Glynn Moody)
4. How Buildings Learn -- if you haven't seen this show, you should. On-the-money criticism of architecture and architects, talking about what's important when you design things for people. (via Kottke)