The Fun Theory

In one of my favorite reads this last year, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, author Stuart Brown talks about play as “an un-realized power that can transform our social and economic lives.”

As I read, I realized:
- We have replaced play with homework--big mistake
- Play is how our passions find us
- Play is where happiness finds us, and
- Play is where failure isn’t failure and isn’t emotionally charged. Play is all about iteration and we iterate on the emerging questions that arise from within us and that we are driven to understand.

Some of the most accomplished people I’ve met--Dean Kamen, Roderick MacKinnon, Charles Zuker, and Nathan Myhrvold--talk about their work as play. When I ask them how they played as children, they often describe activities that explore the same questions and ideas they are exploring today in their work. At a gathering of molecular scientists, more than a few whispered that, as children, they'd electrocuted bugs--they had to know what would happen. Interaction, reaction. One of them told me that his MBA sister had a chemistry set that looked as if it had never been used, while his was trashed shortly after he opened it. He tried everything.

Recently, VW launched a campaign, The Fun Theory. The videos on the site show people:
- Choosing stairs over an escalator in a subway station when the stairs are turned into piano keys
- Recycling glass when the glass recycle bin is like a slot machine, and
- Clearing litter when a trash can offers sound effects as trash is pitched in.

The Fun Theory Award competition is accepting entries until November 15. Short window, competition opened October 1. Radar readers are brainy and creative. A winning combination!

Four short links: 26 August 2009

Food, NoSQL, Brain Power, Social Data

1. Better BBQ Through Chemistry -- food is the perfect ground for geek training: there are measurements, there's science, it's easy to know whether you've succeeded, and you can eat all but the worst of your failures. (via BoingBoing)
2. NoSQL (East) -- conference on East Coast for relationless databases.
3. Human Brain Processing Speed -- clocked at 60bits/second, according to this MIT Technology Review article. Their approach eventually led to Hick's Law, one of the few laws of experimental psychology. It states that the time it takes to make a choice is linearly related to the entropy of the possible alternatives. The results from various reaction-time experiments seem to show that this is the case. Although one byproduct of this approach is that the results are intimately linked to the type of experiment used to measure the reaction time. And that makes each study peculiarly vulnerable to the idiosyncrasies of the experimental approach. Today, Fermi Moscoso del Prado Martín from the Université de Provence in France proposes a new way to study reaction times by analyzing the entropy of their distribution, rather in the manner of thermodynamics. (via Hacker News)
4. Truly Social Data -- Data will only be truly social when you can work with it in the kinds of ways we work with information in the real, non-computational, world. In the real world we don’t ask for permission to have an opinion on something, to add to the ball of information surrounding a concept. Our needs don’t have to be anticipated by programmers. We can share information as we please. For example, nobody owns the concept of Barcelona. If I want to essentially “tag” Barcelona as being hot, or noisy, or beautiful, I just do it. I can keep my opinion private, I can share it with certain others, I can hold conflicting opinions, I can organize things in multiple ways at the same time and give things many names.

Four short links: 3 August 2009

Mathematics Collaboration, Risk, Visualisation, and SemWeb

1. Enabling Massively Parallel Mathematics Collaboration -- Jon Udell writes about Mike Adams whose WordPress plugin to grok LaTeX formatting of math has enabled a new scale of mathematics collaboration.
2. 2845 Ways to Spin The Risk -- introduction to the ways in which our perception of risk (and numbers in general) can be distorted by how it is presented. (via titine on Twitter)
3. Logstalgia -- OpenGL app to visualize Apache log files.
4. 4Store -- "scalable RDF storage". 4store was designed by Steve Harris and developed at Garlik to underpin their Semantic Web applications. It has been providing the base platform for around 3 years. At times holding and running queries over databases of 15GT, supporting a Web application used by thousands of people. (via joshua on Delicious)

Four short links: 22 July 2009

Augmented Reality, A/B Psych, Open Source Heartbeat, Launchpad Launches

1. ARtisan -- AR Flash library, the fastest and easiest way from point A to point B in browser based augmented reality. Love the demos on the home page. (via and bjepson)
2. How to Increase Sign-ups By 200% -- A/B testing from 37Signals showed that "See Plans and Pricing" got twice the clickthroughs of "Free Trial!" and variations thereon. (via kathysierra on Twitter)
3. Open Source Heart Monitor, Possible Blood Sugar Level Detector -- another step forward in sensor networks and personal data: I’ve set up a quick prototype of a device that will monitor my heart rate while I sleep. It includes a BUGbase + BUGvonHippel module (from my company Bug Labs). I’m also using a custom module we put together that uses a Polar radio receiver (from Sparkfun) and a Polar strap that I wear around my chest. Lastly, we wrote a simple program that runs on the BUG to log the data. (via chr1a on Twitter)
4. Launchpad Opensourced -- Canonical's code hosting and collaboration platform that was heavily lusted after in the open souce world, finally open sourced and in its entirety. GNU Affero license.

Four short links: 15 July 2009

A collection inspired by Science Foo Camp attendees

1. Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor (PNAS) -- We found that a trader's morning testosterone level predicts his day's profitability. We also found that a trader's cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas cortisol is increased by risk. Our results point to a further possibility: testosterone and cortisol are known to have cognitive and behavioral effects, so if the acutely elevated steroids we observed were to persist or increase as volatility rises, they may shift risk preferences and even affect a trader's ability to engage in rational choice.
2. The Origin of Universal Scaling Laws in Biology -- eye-opening paper that blew my mind. Highlight of Sci Foo was meeting the author and shaking his hand. Relates metabolic rate, size, heart rate, and lifespan by applying physics to biology.
3. Ushahidi -- open source software for managing disasters. The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.
4. Dissecting the Canon: Visual Subject Co-Popularity Networks in Art Research -- In this paper we analyze a classic da- taset of art research, which collects ancient art and architecture and their Western Renaissance documentation since 1947. [T]here is clearly a long tail of monument popularity.

Four short links: 7 July 2009

Motivation, R, Games, and Open Source Medicine

1. Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them -- Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed. I have noticed this myself. It must be balanced against the other finding that public commitment increases probability of followthrough, which might work in sales but seems to fail miserably in getting me to do anything productive. (via migurski on Delicious)
2. Rseek -- search engine for info on R. Necessary because of the non-unique project name. (via Benjamin Mako Hill)
3. Treasure World (Offworld) -- Nintendo DS game that turns wifi spots into collectible treasure. You have to explore the real world as you play the game, another of these games that mix the online and offline worlds. (via waxy)
4. 50 Successful Open Source Projects That Are Changing Medicine -- notice the large number of electronic health record (EHR) suites. What are the chances of any of them getting a slice of Obama's EHR money that the ex-RedHatters behind The Axial Project are going for? (via timoreilly on Twitter)

Four short links: 23 June 2009

1. Easter Eggs for Real Life (Neil Gaiman) -- ok, I know easter eggs are already part of real life, but this is still cool. Gaiman recommends a restaurant run by a friend, and the friend has set up a special phrase that to mention to the server, at which point something good and special will happen for them to eat or drink. Think of it as a restaurant Easter Egg. I love language, I love Gaiman's books, I love surprises, and I love that here Gaiman's using the digital sense of Easter Egg (surprise hidden in a program) rather than the analog sense (because there's no searching involved).
2. ASCAP Wants To Be Paid When Your Phone Rings (EFF) -- what the title suggests. You are lost in a twisty maze of rights, all policed by vampires. From ASCAP's point of view, this is a legitimate claim. From anyone else's point of view, it's ridiculous.
3. Tooling Up The Body (MInd Hacks) -- using tools has lots of interesting effects on our perception is the general gist of an intriguing study that provides further evidence for the theory that the brain treats tools as temporary body parts. We talk about using the Internet as our "offsite brain", so it tickles me to learn that the brain treats tools as offsite body parts.
4. Email Patterns Can Predict Impending Doom (New Scientist) -- when Enron was about to collapse, email patterns changed: the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees. Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely. (via BoingBoing)

Four short links: 16 June 2009

1. Dealing with Election Results Data -- taking the raw UK European election data into Google's Fusion Tables to try and make sense of it. More cloud-based tools for the data scientist within. (via Simon Willison)
2. Time for an Open 311 API -- "311" is the US number to call for non-emergency municipal services. There have been a lot of individual projects to hack together web sites that provide the single coherent view of government services that the government itself is unable to offer, but the individual projects have all built their own APIs. SeeClickFix suggest these be unified so tools can be written (e.g., iPhone apps) that run across multiple municipalities. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Shoppers Cars Soon Able to Power Supermarkets (Daily Mail) -- At the Sainsbury's store in Gloucester, kinetic plates, which were embedded in the road yesterday, are pushed down every time a vehicle passes over them. A pumping action is then initiated through a series of hydraulic pipes that drive a generator. The plates are able to produce 30kw of green energy an hour - more than enough to power the store's checkouts. (via Freaklabs)
4. Humans Prefer Cockiness to Expertise (New Scientist) -- the blogosphere explained in one paper. (via Mind Hacks)

Four short links: 4 June 2009

Google Wave, Education, Intelligence, and Twitterspawn

1. Wave Robot Ruby Client -- Sam Ruby ported the Wave Robot Python Client library to Ruby. He found that the wire protocol is full of Java classnames, and says, Overall, I feel that this Google Wave could benefit from earlier and wider reviews. In the comments, a Google employee replies The Java API was implemented first... We are working on de-Java-fying the wire protocol and making the python robot client library more “pythonic”.. Lovely to see Google actively cocreating with the wider web world, because the alternative (the old-school "we know better, use my sacred code you unworthy mortal" arrogance) does not lead to successful web-wide technology.
2. How Do I Remediate THAT? -- my favourite blogging teacher observes that his remedial math class don't engage as much, even with the fun videos he plays to start discussions. The comments are fascinating, and point to gems like the following:
3. Describing the Habits of Mind -- the habits that humans exhibit when they behave intelligently. E.g., Managing Impulsivity. Goal-directed, self-imposed delay of gratification is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. Effective problem solvers are deliberate: they think before they act. [...] They decrease their need for trial and error by gathering information, taking time to reflect on an answer before giving it, making sure they understand directions, and listening to alternative points of view. Often, students blurt out the first answer that comes to mind. Sometimes they shout an answer, start to work without fully understanding the directions, lack an organized plan or strategy for approaching a problem, or make immediate value judgments about an idea (criticizing or praising it) before they fully understand it. They may take the first suggestion given or operate on the first idea that comes to mind rather than consider alternatives and the consequences of several possible directions. Research demonstrates, however, that less impulsive, self-disciplined students are more successful.
4. The Spawn of Twitter Data (Jess3 + Brian Solis) -- visually-pleasing graphic of the different services and application areas built around the use of Twitter data. (via Flowing Data)

Four short links: 1 June 2009

Spymaster, Arsenic, Maps, and Happiness

1. Spymaster -- a faux-spy game on Twitter: Each player becomes a master of a spy ring based upon their Twitter followers list. The more people that follow you and are playing characters in Spymaster, the more powerful your network will be. As a spymaster, you can perform tasks or attack other spymasters on Twitter. With each successful attempt, you will gain virtual currency and points that allow you to grow even stronger. I'm nervous that it's a project of a classified ads company, but intelligent friends appear to be enjoying it, but that may just be be the jaded eye of a world-weary veteran of pyramid schemes and spamalots.
2. Getting Arsenic Out Of Water -- MIT Technology Review piece about the IBM discovery that a chemical used to pattern chips also acts as a membrane to remove arsenic. More stuff that matters. (via roterhund on Twitter)
3. Mapumental -- MySociety folks making maps useful. It's the continuation of time travel maps, where bus, train, tram, tube, and ferry timetables are mashed with real estate prices to show you where you can live for what you can afford and how long a commute you want. A new twist is crowdsourced "how scenic is this area?" data, so you can choose other dimensions for where you might want to live. New dimensions on transportation data and travel planning.
4. What Makes Us Happy? (The Atlantic) -- the real world is a lot more complex than trivial "get happy fast!" self-help books would have you believe. This longitudinal study shows how complex happiness and misery are. Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” (via timoreilly on Twitter)

Four short links: 29 May 2009

Meatware Hacks, iPhone Web Stats, Distributed Hash Tables, Richard Feynman Fun

1. Freedom for OS X -- Mac app that disables networking for up to eight hours so you can get work done without Internet distractions. Technology workarounds for meatware bugs. (via Joshua-Michèle Ross).
2. iPhone Casts a Giant Shadow on the Web -- 43% of mobile web traffic is from iPhone users, as measured by "the world's largest purveyor of ads on mobile apps and websites". As I was told today, "more people are spending more time looking at the web through one of these. For how much longer can you afford to ignore it?" (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Why you won't be building your killer app on a distributed hash table (Jonathan Ellis) -- locking and sophisticated queries. I'm still trying to figure out where we'll end up with these "let's do something simple in a way that lets us scale horizontally, and then build on top of that" approaches to solving the big data/graph theory problems behind many modern apps.
4. Richard Feynman Interviews at Microsoft -- a bit of fun to start the weekend on. (new URL 20090601)

Four short links: 25 May 2009

1. China is Logging On -- blogging 5x more popular in China than in USA, email 1/3 again as popular in USA as China. These figures are per-capita of Internet users, and make eye-opening reading. (via Glyn Moody)
2. The Economics of Google (Wired) -- the money graf is Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its various business units. Since moving a product's storage and computation to a new data center is disruptive, engineers often put it off. "I suggested we run an auction similar to what the airlines do when they oversell a flight. They keep offering bigger vouchers until enough customers give up their seats," Varian says. "In our case, we offer more machines in exchange for moving to new servers. One group might do it for 50 new ones, another for 100, and another won't move unless we give them 300. So we give them to the lowest bidder—they get their extra capacity, and we get computation shifted to the new data center."
3. Why Washington Doesn't Get New Media -- Things eventually improved, but despite the stunning advances in communications technology, most of federal Washington has still failed to grasp the meaning of Government 2.0. Indeed, much is mired in Government 1.5. Government 1.5? That’s a term of art for the vast virtual ecosystem taking root in Washington that has set up the trappings of 2.0 — the blogs, the Facebook pages, the Twitter accounts — but lacks any intellectual heartbeat. Too many aides in official Washington are setting up blogs and social media pages because they understand that is what they are supposed to do. All the while, many are sweating the possibility that they might actually have to say something substantive or engage the public directly. It is the nature of midlevel know-nothings to grinfuck any idea that would force them to substantially change their behaviour. We incentivize this when we talk about "you must have a blog" (ok, I'll get comms to write it), or "put up a wiki for this" (ok, but there'll be no moderation so it'll be ignorable chaos). Describe the behaviour you want and not a tool that might produce it. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. On the Information Armageddon (Mind Hacks) -- Vaughn points out that the much-linked-to New York Magazine article on attention is a crock. I didn't like it because it was wordy and self-indulgent, Vaughn because it didn't actually cite any studies other than one which was described incorrectly. History has taught us that we worry about widespread new technology and this is usually expressed in society in terms of its negative impact on our minds and social relationships. If you're really concerned about cognitive abilities, look after your cardiovascular health (eat well and exercise), cherish your relationships, stay mentally active and experience diverse and interesting things. All of which have been shown to maintain mental function, especially as we age.

Four short links: 19 May 2009

Recession Map, Gaming Psychology, Charging For Unwanted Content, and Two Great Projects

1. Economic Stress Map Outlines Recession's Stories (AP) -- The Stress Index synthesizes three complex sets of ever-evolving data. By factoring in monthly numbers for foreclosure, bankruptcy and most painfully unemployment, the AP has assembled a numeral that reflects the comparative pain each American county is feeling during these dark economic days. Fascinating view of the country, and I wish I had one for New Zealand.
2. Handed Keys to Kingdom, Gamers Race to Bottom (Wired) -- Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early. Not only a lesson for creators of user-generated content sites, but also for students of human nature: if you provide a number, some people will act to maximize that number come what may. See also friend counts on social networks. (via jasonwryan on Twitter)
3. San Jose Mercury News to Charge For Online Content -- congratulations to the SJMN for trying something, my regrets that it's this. This business model didn't fail in 1998 because there weren't enough people on the Internet, it failed for the same reason it will fail now: you have a generic product and a cheaper substitute will win.
4. Two Groundbreaking Open Source Projects -- two open source projects that are developing software in very different ways (one with centralised authority, one more distributed), large (60k and 200k+ LOC), in some cases teaching people to code from scratch, with a wonderful vibe and solid outputs. I was stunned and delighted at the OTW’s process for choosing a programming language for the Archive. In the Livejournal post, Python vs Ruby deathmatch!, they asked non-programmers to read up on either language and then write a short “Choose your own adventure” program. {The trick is that we would like you to try writing this program with no help from any programmers or coders. DO feel free to help each other out in the comments, ask your flist for help (as long as you say “no coders answer!”), or to Google for other help or ideas-in fact, if you find a different tutorial or book out there which you think is better than the ones below, we really want to hear about it.} There were 74 comments in reply, and the results — 150 volunteers on the project, many of whom had never programmed before — speak for themselves. It makes me realize how much of the macho meritocracy "it's just about how GOOD YOU ARE" individual-excellence cocks-out culture in programming in general and open source in particular isn't about what's necessary to make good programs and good programmers, it's what's necessary to make great egos feel good about themselves.

Four short links: 18 May 2009

Scientists, Scammers, Satellites, and Safe Havens

1. Scientists Without Borders -- "Mobilizing Science, Improving Lives". mobilize and coordinate science-based activities that improve quality of life in the developing world. The research community, aid agencies, NGOs, public-private partnerships, and a wide variety of other institutions are already promoting areas such as global health, agricultural progress, and environmental well-being, but current communication gaps restrict their power. Organizations and individuals do not always know about one another's endeavors, needs, or availability, which limits the ability to forge meaningful connections and harness resources. This situation is especially striking in light of the growing realization that integrated rather than focused approaches are crucial for addressing key challenges such as extreme poverty and the glaring health problems that accompany it. See also Geeks Without Borders, but is there anyone running a program that sends geeks into the field where they're needed? I know a lot of open source folks who have been volunteering around the world in poor nations, but I haven't found a site that coordinates this. Can anyone point me to such a thing?
2. The Psychology of Being Scammed -- UK government report into the psychology of scammers' victims. Lots of insights into successful scams (parallels drawn to finance or startups left as exercise to reader) and some counter-intuitive findings like Scam victims often have better than average background knowledge in the area of the scam content. For example, it seems that people with experience of playing legitimate prize draws and lotteries are more likely to fall for a scam in this area than people with less knowledge and experience in this field. This also applies to those with some knowledge of investments. Such knowledge can increase rather than decrease the risk of becoming a victim. (via Mind Hacks)
3. GPS Accuracy Could Start Dropping In 2010 (Tidbits) -- the Air Force has had difficulty launching new satellites. The GAO has calculated - using reliability curves for each operational satellite - that the probability of keeping a 24-satellite constellation in orbit drops below 95 percent in 2010, and could drop as low as 80 percent in 2011 and 2012. (via geowanking)
4. Open Database Alliance -- an attempt to provide a safe home for MySQL given the Oracle acquisition of Sun. [...] a vendor-neutral consortium designed to become the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other enhancements for the MySQL community and partner ecosystem. The Open Database Alliance will comprise a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.

Your brain really is forgetting... a LOT

I'm currently reading Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life by Dr. Sandra Aamodt and Dr. Sam Wang. The enormity of the title notwithstanding, I'm enjoying the book, and ran across this rather amazing quotation:

There is good evidence that we "erase" and "rewrite" our memories every time we call them, suggesting that if it were ever possible to erase specific content, playing it back first might be an essential component.

This is a staggering statement. Consider the implications: when you recall a memory, you are capable of - and prone to - rewriting that memory in some form. I find this particularly fascinating in terms of teaching in a spiral method, something I continue to find effective and even critical in highly technical topics.

Take memory management in any programming language. It's simply foolish to unload the truck on an unsuspecting learner, dumping out everything there is to know about memory management at one time, in one place, with little or no functional motivation. The better approach is to incrementally teach the topic, adding additional resolution, detail, and expansion only when new functionality is needed or additional understanding is required. In this way, you're catering to the learner: each piece of information you're unpacking is motivated by a need in that learner. This results in greater internalization of the information, and less information is categorized as "I don't really need this. I'll dump this."

But with the quote by Aamodt and Wang, there's another component at work here: earlier memories are potentially being rewritten as new learning takes place. This is intuitive, even: consider how often we mix up events that are very similar, but not the same. Have you eaten at Chuy's 10 times in the last month (I'm about there)? If so, I'd suspect you'll have a hard time distinguishing at which instance in 10 a certain conversation happened, especially without other mitigating details (a really close friend attended only one meal, or something particularly disastrous happened at another). Is it possible that the brain is trying to shove these similar events into one giant event, because we're recalling an earlier (similar) event, replaying it, and rewriting it with the new one?

What this seems to suggest -- and I grant that there's a lot of theorizing and speculation happening, but what else is Radar good for if not some provocative thought -- is that we must be extremely careful with context. When you recall an earlier mental model of something, and then augment that model, you may be rewriting the earlier model. In other words, you're not just adding to an in-place model, but in fact replacing an earlier model with a newer, expanded one. So what are you doing to ensure the foundational models stay intact? Are you repeating the earlier model, and adding resolution? Or are you just writing about the "new stuff" without regard for the existing material?

I think most textbooks and technical books continue to heap on, assuming that pre-existing models remain in place. Foundational concepts never die, these books would assert (if not implicitly, then by the manner in which they teach). But perhaps those concepts do die! Perhaps this is why you may be adept at releasing memory or allocating memory, but would flail about helplessly at explaining what's really going on. Is it possible that your original mental model has been overwritten, or even functionally replaced?

It's an interesting thought. Context becomes critical, not just as a reminder of pre-existing material, but actually to ensure that pre-existing material is not lost altogether.

C'mon teachers, you must have thoughts on this... let's hear them.

Four short links: 21 Apr 2009

Space arrays, mobile hell, book scanners, and open source brains:

1. Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown (Wired) -- Satellite hackers in Brazil are bouncing ham signals off a disused US military satellite array. Truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities threaten to close in. Drug dealers and organized criminal factions use them to coordinate operations. [...] "Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil." As William Gibson said, "the street finds its own uses for things." One man's space junk is another man's Make project. (via BoingBoing)
2. My Students, My Cellphone, My Ordeal -- there's probably a market selling lightweight forensic tools to schools, specifically to avoid scenarios like this poor man's.
3. DIY High Speed Book Scanner From Trash and Cheap Cameras (Instructables) -- $300 of parts gets you a reasonably high-quality scanner. It doesn't have an automatic page turner, but it's still a step up on "open the scanner lid, change the page, close the lid, hit scan, wait, [repeat until braindead]". We have a huge legacy of analog, and we're going to need consumer-grade consumer-priced systems if we are to rip-mix-burn our cultural legacy. What would the Google Books settlement look like if we all had high-speed scanners to do to our bookshelves what iTunes did to our CD shelves? (via BoingBoing)
4. OpenCog Brainwave Projects in Google's Summer of Code -- in case you think GSoC is all about GNOME apps getting alternate shortcuts for DVORAK keyboards, there's some esoteric stuff being approved. I wish that when I was a college student someone had paid me to work on a Application of Pleasure Algorithm Project.

Four short links: 8 Apr 2009

Bias, RFCs, virus batteries, and a glimpse at life beyond record labels (the last item features profanity, beware):

1. Bias We Can Believe In (Mind Hacks) -- Vaughn asks the tricky question about the current enthusiasm for Behavioural Economics in government: where are the sceptical voices? As he points out, It's perhaps no accident that almost all the articles cite a 2001 study that found that simply making the US's 401(k) retirement savings scheme opt-out instead of opt-in vastly increased participation simply because it's a hassle to change and employees perceive the 'default' as investment advice. But it's probably true to say that this example has been so widely repeated but it's one of the minority of behavioural economics studies that have looked at the relation between the existence of a cognitive bias and real-world economic data from the population. And it's notable that behavioural economists who specialise in making this link, a field they call behavioural macroeconomics, seem absent from the Obama inner circle.
2. How The Internet Got Its Rules (NYTimes) -- about the first RFCs, which became IETF. The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard. (via Glynn Moody)
3. Viruses Could Power Devices (Science News) -- Ions and electrons can move through smaller particles more quickly. But fabricating nano-sized particles of iron phosphate is a difficult and expensive process, the researchers say. So Belcher’s team let the virus do the work. By manipulating a gene of the M13 virus to make the viruses coat themselves in iron phosphate, the researchers created very small iron phosphate particles. (via BoingBoing)
4. Amanda Palmer's Label-Dropping Game -- interesting email from Amanda Palmer to her fans about trying to get dropped from her label. i had to EXPLAIN to the so-called "head of digital media" of roadrunner australia WHAT TWITTER WAS. and his brush-off that "it hasn’t caught on here yet" was ABSURD because the next day i twittered that i was doing an impromptu gathering in a public park and 12 hours later, 150 underage fans - who couldn’t attend the show - showed up to get their records signed. no manager knew! i didn’t even warn or tell her! no agents! no security! no venue! we were in a fucking public park! life is becoming awesome. and then the times they are a-changing fucking dramatically, when pong-twittering with trent reznor means way more to your fan-base/business than whether or not the record is in fucking stores (and in my case, it ain’t in fucking stores).

Four short links: 25 Mar 2009

IT, AI, IQ, and UK today:

1. Definition IT -- a blog about the ways in which IT is becoming a problem and not a solution. In the absence of any independent global standards or best practice models that guide the delivery of technology into businesses we have relinquished control to the suppliers of our technology. The suppliers are in a mammoth arms race to sell more products and this has become the de-facto controller for the delivery of technology into businesses. No one statement in the blog is outrageous, but they add up and indicate an industry that isn't delivering the value it claims to.
2. What is a Good Recommendation Algorithm? -- Greg Linden starts an interesting conversation at the CACM blogs.
3. Why Money Messes With Your Mind (New Scientist) -- interesting psychological research. the volunteers who had been primed with the money-related words worked on the task for longer before asking for help. In a related experiment, people in the money-word group were also significantly less likely to help a fellow student who asked for assistance than were people in the group primed with non-money words.
4. Obama's Diplomatic Gift to UK Leader Fubared by DRM (BoingBoing) -- we can laugh, but Obama's team is stacked with ex-RIAA lawyers.

Four short links: 12 Feb 2009

Two links on visualization and two on life:

1. Myth of the Concentration Oasis -- Vaughan of Mind Hacks takes on the trendy notion that the Internet is turning us into brainless dullards who are unable to focus on any subject for longer than a 15s TV commercial. "The trouble is, it's plainly rubbish, and you just have to spend time with some low tech communities to see this is the case."
2. UUorld -- gorgeous map-based visual analytics environment for Mac OS X. Lovely to see something step beyond the "throw it onto a Google Map", which has become commonplace.
3. Why I Can't Afford Cheap -- great story about an octogenarian talking about her prized possessions. (via Titine's delicious stream)
4. Visualization Trends for the Noosphere (Jon Udell) -- thoughtful commentary on what's needed to make data visualization as simple as email. Viz is an incredibly powerful tool for translating data into understanding, but it's currently too damn hard to "mix the paint" (Udell's great term for the data hacking to convert, fix, etc. the data before they can be used). (via Titine's delicious stream)

Four short links: 11.5 Feb 2009

This second Feb 11 post was brought to you by the intersection of timezones and technology. If there's a third Feb 11 post, I'm changing my name to Bill Murray.

1. Hacking the Earth -- an environmental futurist looks at "geoengineering", deliberately interfering with the Earth's systems to terraform the planet. Radical solution to global warming, unwise hubris and immoral act of the highest folly, or all of the above? (via Matt Jones)
2. Reinvention Draws Near for Newsweek -- fascinating look at how Newsweek are refocusing their magazine. "If we don't have something original to say, we won't. The drill of chasing the week's news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable." gives me hope. Newsweek are hoping to target fewer but richer advertisers, essentially a business strategy of tapping existing customers for more. This feels like they're ceding the contested parts of their business (commodity news stories) and doubling down on the bits that nobody else is fighting for yet (their columnists, pictures, whitespace). What else could they do? Possibly nothing (see Innovator's Dilemma), but the alternative is figuring out something new that people want and giving them that. Easy to say, hard for anyone to do.
3. Tinkerkit - a physical computing kit for designers. Arduino-compatible components for rapid prototyping. Sweet!
4. Stanford University YouTube Channel -- short interesting talks by Stanford researchers. Brains on chips, stem cells to fight deafness, and brain imagery are some of the first up there. The talks aren't condescending or vague, they're aimed at "a bright and curious audience", as the Mind Hacks blog post about them put it.