Entries tagged with “money” from O'Reilly Radar

Wed

Sep 30
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 30 September 2009

Smart Materials, Google OCR API, Teaching Webinar, HistEx

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

  1. Smart Materials in Architecture -- Using thermal bimetals can allow architects to experiment with shape-changing buildings, Ritter said. Thermal bimetals include a combination of materials with different expansion coefficients that can cause a change in. Under changing temperatures this can lead one side of a compound to bend more than the other side, potentially creating an entirely different shape, he said. A little impractical at the moment, but think of it as hackers experimenting with what's possible, iterating to find the fit between materials possibility and customer need. (via Liminal Existence)
  2. Google OCR API -- The server will attempt to extract the text from the images; creating a new Google Doc for each image. Experimental at this stage, and early users report periodic crashes. Still, it's a useful service. I wonder whether they're seeing how people correct the scan text and using that to train the OCR algorithms. (via Waxy)
  3. My O'Reilly Podcast: Dan Meyer -- I'm not pimping this because it's O'Reilly (O'R do heaps of stuff I don't mention) but because it's the astonishingly brilliant Dan Meyer. For everything it does well, the US model of math education conditions students to anticipate narrowly defined problems with narrowly prescribed solutions. This puts them in no place to anticipate the ambiguous, broadly defined, problems they'll need to solve after graduation, as citizens. This webcast will define two contributing factors to this intellectual impatience and then suggest a solution.
  4. Inflation Conversion Factors for Dollars 1774 to Estimated 2019 -- in PDF and Excel format. I've wanted such a table in the past for answering those inevitable "... in today's dollars?" historical business questions. (via Schuyler on Delicious)

tags: architecture, data, education, google, history, materials science, money | comments: 2
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Fri

May 22
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 22 May 2009

Villainous Javascript, Funding the Arts, Peak Web, and Crowdsourced Quality Control at a Museum

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

  1. Hiding Dirty Deeds: "Encrypted" Client-Side Code -- obfuscated Javascript from a Facebook phishing site, deconstructed and reconstructed, parsed and glossed for understanding. It reminds me of the best obfuscated Perl: Latin, string substitution, runtime and compile-time semantics ... a work of evil art. (via waxy)
  2. Kickstarter -- artistic commercial version of PledgeBank. You say "I want to do [X] by Y and it takes $Z" and people can donate to your goal. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
  3. Peak Web (Chris Heathcote) -- My biggest problem is that people always perceive the near-past, present and near-future as having the most technological change, and the speed of decline of the old new media feels wrong. I am, however, thinking that there’s something true in one reading of the graph: we may be at or past Peak Web.
  4. Crowdsourcing the Cleanup with Freeze Tag -- The Awe-Worthy Brooklyn Museum, like all cultural institutions, have more objects than they can add metadata to. They let users provide metadata through tagging, but all crowdsourcing projects permit vandals. Their solution: crowdsource the cleanup. My only question is whether this will become a game between vandals and janitors. Brooklyn Museum is noteworthy for their insanely great use of the web, check them out and please support them if you like what you see.
sign with Twitter URL in big letters and facebook in small ones
Warning sign of peak web

tags: crowdsourcing, culture, javascript, money, programming, security, web | comments: 0
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