Four short links: 23 November 2009

Scams, Swirl, Crisis, and Coasters

1. Top E-Tailers Profiting From Scams -- Vertrue, Webloyalty, and Affinion generated more than $1.4 billion by "misleading" Web shoppers, said members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. [...] The government says the investigation shows that [the companies] "trick" consumers into entering their e-mail address just before they complete purchases at sites such as Orbitz, Priceline.com, Buy.com, 1-800 Flowers, Continental Airlines, Fandango, and Classmates.com. A Web ad, which many consumers say appears to be from the retailer, offers them cash back or coupon if they key in their e-mail address.
2. Image Swirl (Google Labs) -- interesting image search result navigator. It's fun to play with, trying to figure out why particular sets of images are grouped together.
3. Create Crisis (Dan Meyer) -- great call to arms for educators. It's still astonishing to me how few "learning xyz" books follow this advice. Would-be authors, take note! If there were ever an easy way to make your computer book stand out for being better than the rest, this is it!
4. Typographic Character Coasters -- the single best argument for laser cutters evar. Send the patterns to Ponoko if you don't have a laser cutter handy.

Four short links: 3 November 2009

Electoral Cryptography, Dataless Airport Security, Visualising Transport Data, Mathematically Insecure Social Asymmetry

1. First Test for Election Cryptography (MIT Technology Review) -- The first government election to use a new cryptographic scheme that lets both voters and auditors check that votes were cast and recorded accurately will be held tomorrow in Takoma Park, MD. Founder of the company behind the technology is David Chaum, who ran the first electronic currency company in the 90s. That was ahead of its time (Internet faced a credibility problem, not a convenience problem), but his timing for this seems spot-on. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
2. Do I Have The Right To Refuse This Search? -- a former police officer questions the efficacy of TSA screenings and is doubly worried by by the lack of data collected. For years in policing, we relied on random patrols to curb crime. We relied upon this “strategy” until someone went out and captured some data, and did a study that demonstrated conclusively that random patrols do not work (Kansas City Study). As police have employed other types of “random” interventions, as in DWI checkpoints, they have had to develop policies, procedures and training to ensure that the “random” nature of these intrusions is truly random. Whether every car gets checked, or every tenth car, police must demonstrate that they have attempted to eliminate the effects of active and passive discrimination when using “random” strategies. No such accountability currently exists at TSA. Trend I see lately is a return to quantitative decision making, reality-based data-directed system interventions. (via BoingBoing)
3. Visualising Transport Data -- It can be hard to make meaningful information from huge amounts of data, a graph and a table doesn't always communicate all it should do. We have been working hard on technology to visualise big datasets into compelling stories that humans can understand. We were really pleased with what we came up with in just one and a half days. Like many places, the UK data.gov ran a dev camp to jumpstart people using their data. These appear to be successful, but I'm not aware of studies into the longterm effects nor the "value" of different types of developers.
4. Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do -- there's a numerical optical illusion at work here: count your friends, then ask them to count their friends. If you average the friend counts of your peers, it'll probably be higher than your friend count. The reason for this is also why (on average!) your sexual partners seem to have had more sexual partners than you, and why previous generations seem more fecund than current generations. It's because connectors (with large numbers of friends) distort the average, so unless you're the connector (and if you're reading this, you might well be!) the average will be bigger than a normal person's friend count. Left unmentioned is what kind of person would count the number of friends they have, then ask their friends for their counts .... (via Hacker News)

Four short links: 2 October 2009

Social Media Parasites, Open Government Data, Prime Numbers, Amazon Image Abuse

1. I'm Tired of Your Analogue Attitude -- hilarious animated clip about social media gurus, made using xtranormal. (via trib on twitter)
2. Three Laws of Open Government Data -- 1. If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist; 2. If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage; 3. If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower. (also see slide deck)
3. Structure and Randomness in the Prime Numbers -- paper about some of the fun mathematics around prime numbers. (via Hacker News)
4. Abusing Amazon Images -- decoding and doing fun things with the Amazon images API. The cool thing (if you want to generate unlikely Amazon images) is that you're not limited to one use of any of these commands. You can have multiple discounts, multiple shadows, multiple bullets, generating images that Amazon would never have on its site. However, every additional command you add generates another 10% to the image dimensions, adding white space around the image. And that 10% compounds; add a lot of bullets, and you'll find that you have a small image in a large blank space. (You can use the CR command to cut away the excess, however.) Note also that the commands are interpreted in order, which can have an impact on what overlaps what.

Four short links: 11 September 2009

Healthcare Fellow, Javascript Math, Web PDF Viewer, Tweeting Kegerator

1. Healthspottr Fellow -- outstanding entrepreneurs will be awarded prizes of up to $250,000 to accelerate their innovative endeavours. Think MacArthur Genius Grant for healthcare. (via Gov 2.0 Summit)
2. jsMath -- Javascript for embedding Math in web pages. (via Hacker News)
3. Google's Undocumented Embeddable PDF Viewer -- Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online. (via Waxy)
4. Tweeting Kegerator -- network connected keg that tells you when it's about to run out.

Four short links: 9 September 2009

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

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: 3 September 2009

Smarter Eyes, Urinal Protocol Efficiency, Petabytes on a Budget, and LocaLondon

1. Many Eyes Make All Bugs Shallow, Especially When The Eyes Get Smarter (David Eaves) -- Mozilla released bug submission data, and David realizes with some minor investment (particularly some simpler vetting screens prior to reaching bugzilla) bug submitters could learn faster. For example, a landing screen that asks you if you've ever submitted a bug before might take newbies to a different page where the bugzilla process is explained in greater detail, the fact that this is not a support site is outlined, and some models of good "submissions" are shared (along with some words of encouragement). By segmenting newbies we might ease the work burden on those who have to vet the bugs.
2. Urinal Protocol Efficiency (xkcd blog) -- geeks are pattern-matching creatures that can count. This leads us to a question: what is the general formula for the number of guys who will fill in N urinals if they all come in one at a time and follow the urinal protocol? One could write a simple recursive program to solve it, placing one guy at a time, but there’s also a closed-form expression. If f(n) is the number of guys who can use n urinals, f(n) for n>2 is given by: [...] The protocol is vulnerable to producing inefficient results for some urinal counts. Some numbers of urinals encourage efficient packing, and others encourage sparse packing. (via Hacker News)
3. Petabytes on a Budget: 67Tb for $7,867 -- DIY cloud hardware. (via timhaines on Twitter)
4. LocaLondon (Chris Heathcote) -- informative, ingenious, and replicable (like all that Chris does), it's a Twitter feed of art exhibitions in London (when they open, when there's a week left, and on the last day) and a glorious horizontal touchscreen-friendly meta-reviews site so you can quickly see at a glance what's on now and what people think of it.

Four short links: 2 September 2009

Happy Programmers, Usability Tool, Geo API, Zombie Math

1. The Programming Language With The Happiest Users (Dolores Labs) -- you'll be surprised. Age before beauty!
2. Judge It Now -- fast market opinions on design decisions. Compare to Optimal Sort. Usability tools hitting the mainstream web, so the time to learn what works shrinks and progress is faster.
3. BlockChalk API -- These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly everything that you can do at http://blockchalk.com. It’s now possible to build client applications, mash-ups, and other tools based on BlockChalk geolocation data and services. Also see the explanatory blog post. (via joshua on Delicious)
4. The Mathematics of Zombie Attacks (PDF) -- Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all. (via Doug McKenna)

Four short links: 20 August 2009

DIY SPY, Screencasting, Social Network Analysis, Term Extraction

1. DIY SPY - a homebrew 2.4GHz wi-fi spectrum analyzer -- As proof of concept (and a cool toy for anyone who has one of these lying around), I have implemented a working Wi-Fi spectrum analyzer on TI’s ez430-RF2500 development kit ($50), a 2-part USB dongle which consists essentially of a CC2500 radio strapped to an MSP430 low-power microcontroller (detachable bottom half) and a USB interface which enumerates as a virtual serial port (top half). The top half doubles as a standalone MSP430 programmer, so this kit is a great cheap way to get started playing with them. (via joshua on Delicious)
2. Screenr -- Instant screencasts for Twitter. Flash-based, uploads to their site and tweets the URL. The whole "for Twitter" thing is going a little too far: who records screencasts only for Twitter? It's like having a spellchecker only for three-letter words.
3. Social Network Analysis in R -- video and slides for talk on doing social network analysis with R.
4. We're Keeping the Term Extraction Service -- Yahoo!'s useful API gets a stay of execution. OK, we heard you. You’ve made it clear to us that shutting down the Term Extraction Service would be a mistake. So, we’ve changed our plans. We're leaving the service up and running indefinitely. (via Simon Willison)

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: 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: 19 June 2009

Cute Math, Fast Slo-Mo, Open Source HVAC, xkcd Hack

1. Inside-Out Multiplication Table -- very cool way to view the patterns of factors. Math is beauty with subscripts.
2. High-Speed Camera -- capture 100 frames at up to 1M frames/second. The sample videos, of a bullet liquefying on impact and a shotgun string boiling past, are stunning. The Makezine high-speed photography kit is the cheap amateur version.
3. Open Source Energy Management for Commercial Buildings -- open source project to enable interoperable applications for integrated Building Automation Systems (BAS). From NovusEdge. I wonder how they're planning to spread their open source and use it to disrupt. (via earth2tech and timoreilly on Twitter)
4. xkcd Knapsack Solution -- for those of you who like literal Python geeking with your comics. Have a great weekend!

Hacking Primes in Mathematica

If this is too esoteric, skip it. I couldn't figure out anywhere else to put it.

This morning, Tim Bray tweeted about a post on prime numbers and Benford's law. To cut the esoterica short, one of the big problems in prime numbers is that people don't know how they're distributed. This post suggests that Benford's Law describes the distribution of the first digit of prime numbers. One of the comments asked an important question: is this really just an artifact of base 10? Math really doesn't "know anything" about bases, so if this idea doesn't generalize to bases other than 10, it doesn't mean much.

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