Four short links: 18 November 2009

Web Time Travel, UK Map Data Liberation, Streetview Mashups, 3D Retail

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Memento: Time Travel for the Web -- clever versioning hack that uses HTTP's content negotiation to negotiate about the date!
2. Ordnance Survey Maps to Go Online -- The prime minister said that by April he hoped a consultation would be completed on the free provision of Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000, (not the scale of a typical Landranger map set at 1:25,000). The online maps would be free to all, including commercial users who, previously, had to acquire expensive and restrictive licences at £5,000 per usage, a fee many entrepreneurs felt was too high. No word yet on license. (more details here)
3. Mapsicle -- open source Javascript library to create mashups and application on Google Streetview, from NZ developers Project X. It has been released by Google as part of the Maps Utility library.
4. Freedom of Creation Shop -- online store for 3D-printed objects. (via Makezine).

Four short links: 11 November 2009

Participation Tools, Open Data Requests, Go Programming Language, Why Open Source is Better

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. ParticipateDB -- database of online tools for public participation. Closed alpha now, with 32 tools and 15 projects in the database. (via Sara Winge)
2. DataTO -- like data.gov, but it's where users request data sets. (In this case, from the Toronto municipal government)
3. Go -- new language from Bell Labs and Unix central figures Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, who now work at Google. Bits of C, bits of Google, it compiles to native binaries and runs nearly as fast as C. Built with concurrency and memory management as central figures. Not used in production at Google yet, but grew from a 20% project to something worthy of public release.
4. On Commit Bits (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) -- that day-one-commit-bit is one of the starkest differences between the corporate and the open source development model. [...] Granted, Django’s very conservative when it comes to granting that commit bit, but I’m not aware of a single open source project under the sun that’d give out a commit bit on a contributor’s first day. I’ve seen developers who’ve been hired to work full time on open source work for months without commit access to the project they’re paid to develop! One of several posts that Jacob's made about why open source makes for (on average) better software.

Unlikely Group Working Happily Together To Solve Patent Problem

by Carl Malamud | @CarlMalamud | comments: 4

People following the issue of open sourcing the U.S. Patent Database might have been surprised to read an announcement in the official business opportunities web site of the U.S. Government: Synopsis for Public Data Dissemination Sole Source Contract to Google, Inc.

While the first reaction of many might be "OMG, WTF, how could they," this is actually good news, with an unlikely cast of characters working together including Google, Intellectual Ventures, and the Internet Archive.

In September, the Patent Office announced a rather strange "Request for Information" (RFI). Under this proposed scheme, the Patent Office would receive a substantial (upwards of $10 million!) donation of equipment from a vendor. In return, the vendor would get to be the official distributor of the patent database to the public, and would get to sell "value-added products." Among other things, the vendor would get access to the patents before the public does, allowing them to mine the database, and would be allowed to sell a variety of bulk products.

While the RFI makes a nod to public access, like all these Zero-Dollar deals the government cuts, there would be a lot of limits on what is "public" data as the vendor tries to recoup their investment by selling the so-called "value-added" products. Readers may remember a similar fiasco with the General Accountability Office where the Federal Legislative Histories were given away to Thomson West and now even the U.S. Congress has to pay to access this material.

The patent database is no ordinary database. This is the only database specifically called out in the U.S. Constitution as being the responsibility of the U.S. Executive Branch to run!  A lot of people think this Zero-Dollar deal the Patent Office is contemplating kind of stinks, and I'm really pleased to announce that a broad coalition has come together to make this data more broadly available immediately:

• Intellectual Ventures, the IP group founded by Nathan Myhrvold, is donating several terabytes of the back file to Public.Resource.Org, the Internet Archive, and a variety of other groups to make available to everybody.
• Google asked for permission to crawl the public application system (known as "PAIR"). The announcement by the Patent Office of a "sole source contract to Google" was the government's way of saying we have permission to crawl their system and bypass the CAPTCHAs. This is good news, because the PAIR system contains the "binders," which is all the material that supplements the basic applications and grants.
• The Internet Archive has set aside a boatload of disk drives to serve this data. In addition, Public.Resource.Org will provide the usual rsync and FTP, and we expect a variety of other groups to provide mirrors both for bulk access and end-user systems.

It goes without saying that Google, the Internet Archive, and Intellectual Ventures are 3 groups that don't often work together, and I think this illustrates the compelling public interest in making the patent database more broadly available. We announced this Section 8 Task Force in a letter to Congressman Mike Honda. And, we also sent in a FOIA request to the Patent Office, putting them on notice that we expect any responses to their RFI $0 boondoggle to be made available to the public, as required by law.

In the long-term, Patent Office just needs to fix their system instead of resorting to silly $0 deals. They have 600 staff in Information Technology and spend hundreds of millions of dollars. Surely, they can find a way to serve the public as part of that? Putting a lien on the Patent database in return for $10 million in hardware instead of fixing their 70's-era mainframes just doesn't make sense.

In the meantime, we should have the first 8 terabytes of data up pretty soon. Those interested in learning more about the issue are urged to consult the paper trail on our PTO page which includes letters to and from Congress, and pointers to the Patent Office procurement docs.

Four short links: 3 November 2009

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

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

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: 30 October 2009

Three Minute Theses, Google Wave RPGs, Public Metadata, and The Finitely-Zoomable Natural World

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. The3is In Three -- PhD students must explain their thesis topic in three minutes and one Powerpoint slide. Winner had written on the last words of Shakespearean characters as they met unlikely ends. No video alas, but what a great idea for an Ignite! (via sciblogs)
2. Google Wave: We Came, We Saw, We Played D&D (ArsTechnica) -- gamers using Wave to play RPGs. This can't be the killer app, however, because it is not pornographic. (via BoingBoing)
3. Metadata is Public Record (ArsTechnica) -- Arizone State Supreme Court rules that metadata on the public record is itself in the public record. The test case was a cop who suspected his performance reports had been created when he asked for them and then backdated. His employer had argued the inode info wasn't part of the public record, even though his report was. Sanity prevailed. (via glynmoody on Twitter)
4. Cell Size and Scale -- sweet zoomable interface to show the different relationships in size between everything from Times Regular 12pt to a Carbon atom (via salt, E. coli, hemoglobin, etc.). (via Tom Carden on Delicious)

Four short links: 9 October 2009

Negative Karma, Wal-Mart TQI, Idiot Airlines, and Native iPhone Apps in Lua

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. Don't Display Negative Karma -- A fascinating insight for those building social software, whether for collective intelligence or otherwise: There can be no negative public karma-at least for establishing the trustworthiness of active users. A bad enough public score will simply lead to that user's abandoning the account and starting a new one, a process we call karma bankruptcy. This setup defeats the primary goal of karma-to publicly identify bad actors. Assuming that a karma starts at zero for a brand-new user that an application has no information about, it can never go below zero, since karma bankruptcy resets it. Just look at the record of eBay sellers with more than three red stars-you'll see that most haven't sold anything in months or years, either because the sellers quit or they're now doing business under different account names. (I love finding articles like this, thinking "they should write a book for us!" and then realizing "oh, they already are!") (via Hacker News)
2. Information Wants to be Free, Even At Wal-Mart (Pete Warden) -- an interesting piece on the value of opening up data, sharing information in negotiations so the best outcome can be reached. I'd argue that this trust argument is usually a cop-out, hiding worries about turf and control. In most cases it's clear that it's not in the other party's best interest to screw you over, and if it is, why are you dealing with them at all? The worst cases I saw were between departments within the same company, often we shared more information with competitors than the guys down the hall. The other reason I see people not sharing is shame: many companies (and individuals) work hard to present a facade of competence and quality that facts belie.
3. The Forest, The Trees, and the Bag Fees -- The bean counters can't track the revenue dilution of all these new fees. They don't want to. We miss the forest for the goddamed trees all the time. And the CEO acts as if fees are found cash. Meanwhile, no one asks why our overall revenue is plunging and we're losing money quarter after quarter. Everyone acts as if one thing has nothing to do with the other. A reminder to watch the important numbers, e.g. cash in bank, profit, customer satisfaction. (via Bryan O'Sullivan)
4. Native iPhone Apps Written in Lua -- open source port of Lua with Cocoa bindings for the iPhone. This is a tutorial showing you how to install and get past Hello, World. Apple have already approved one app written using it.

Four short links: 16 September 2009

Data Sharing, Health Dashboard, DIY Repairs, Crowdsourcing

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Data Sharing: Empty Archives (Nature) -- asking and answering the question "why don't researchers share their data?"
2. San Francisco Health Visual Dashboard -- Health Matters in San Francisco is a o­ne-stop source of non-biased data and information about community health in the City, and healthy communities in general. It is intended to help planners, policy makers, and community members learn about issues and identify improvements. (via the blog of the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess and titine on delicious)
3. iFixit -- information on Mac, iPhone, etc. repair. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. Crowdflower -- labour as a service. Love the analytics. Don't miss the TechCrunch 50 demo. (via waxy)

Four Short Links: 28 August 2009

The Future, Python Metrics, Distributed Version Control, and Stylish R

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. What The Future's All About (Webstock Words) -- Bruce Sterling on the future. We’re not going to get a future Cloud World as somehow opposed to a future Augmented Reality World. It can’t happen. The ideas can be clearly distinguished, but ideas about technology, labels for technology, predictions and suppositions about technology, they don’t map onto actual real-world technology. Human culture doesn’t work like a logical argument.
2. PyMetrics -- code analysis software that produces metrics for your code. (via the excellent 10 Ways To Let People Know You're a Bad Python Programmer by Noah Gift)
3. Prophet and SD 0.7 Are Now Available -- Prophet is a lightweight schemaless database designed for peer to peer replication and disconnected operation. Prophet keeps a full copy of your data and (history) on your laptop, desktop or server. Prophet syncs when you want it to, so you can use Prophet-backed applications whether or not you have network. SD (Simple Defects) is a peer-to-peer issue tracking system built on top of Prophet. In addition to being a full-fledged distributed bug tracker, SD can also bidirectionally sync with your RT, Hiveminder, Trac, GitHub or Google Code issue tracker.
4. Google's R Style Guide -- R is a high-level programming language used primarily for statistical computing and graphics. The goal of the R Programming Style Guide is to make our R code easier to read, share, and verify. The rules below were designed in collaboration with the entire R user community at Google. (via Bo Cowgill's blog)

Open Gov Is a Dialogue, Not a Monologue

by John Geraci | @johngeraci | comments: 9

At last week's Personal Democracy Forum I had a conversation with someone working for a city (I won't say which city), who was tasked with opening up that city's data. We were talking about the Apps for Democracy contests held recently in Washington D.C., and he explained his feeling about them:

"There were some interesting apps in there, but overall they didn't meet with the mayor's agenda for the city."

Being the non-confrontational person I generally am when in conversation with total strangers, I said "Oh yeah?" and the discussion continued without incident. Inwardly though I was thinking, did he really just say that? My god, this guy is missing the point ENTIRELY.

A city that opens up its data but expects that people building on that data should follow the mayor's agenda is going to fail miserably in its attempt at creating an open system.

Open government is about government as platform. And being a platform means letting people do whatever they like with your tools, letting them build in ways that meet their own agendas, not yours. It's about coming to see your users' agendas as your own agenda. If your users win, you win.

On the other hand, if you force your own agenda on your users, then they don't build anything, and everyone loses.

Open gov is a dialogue between governments and constituents, not a monologue. Everyone gets to decide what gets talked about and what gets built, not just the people with the data.

Everyone who works in the web understands this, of course. I know many of the people who are working on opening up government from the inside get this as well. But this conversation, with a senior-level employee at a government agency, made me wonder how many in government don't understand what open gov means, and what the real value and opportunity is to them. How many think of opening up APIs and such as a way to extend their own reach and increase their office's power?

This is one problem with grafting new ideas about platforms and APIs onto an age-old system rooted in a culture of contracts and RFPs. Can this graft produce a living, thriving hybrid of the two? Or will one necessarily become the subordinate of the other? If the latter is the case, which notion wins out? Open platform or fixed agenda?

Four short links: 3 July 2009

Stats, Public Domain, Sewers, and Garbage

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. OECD Factbook -- Flash-built impressive data explorer from OECD. Go to Indicators > Load and, in the words of Ben Goldacre, "prepare for nerdgasm". (via bengoldacre on Twitter)
2. James Boyle is on Twitter -- author of the book The Public Domain.
3. Sewers and Startups (Pete Warden) -- designing to last, reminds me of Saul Griffith's heirloom design riff. When I joined Apple back in 2003, the central build farm for all projects had both PowerPC and x86 Darwin boxes, and our code had to compile on both. Steve was playing a long game, years before the Intel switch he was obviously planning for it, (though I only caught the significance in retrospect).
4. Open Data Makes Garbage Collection Sexier, Easier, and Cheaper -- pragmatic use for open government data. For more on the author of this post, see Hello World for Open Data by Tim Bray.

Naming an Emerging Movement

by John Geraci | @johngeraci | comments: 62

There's a movement going on around the world.

We don't have a name for it, though.

Gov2.0, e-gov, e-democracy, open gov--these are all names that get applied to what is happening. And they are great for describing a certain aspect of this movement, the aspect that actually deals with government.

What's really going on right now is much bigger than that. Open gov is a big part of the story, but not the whole story. On top of Open Gov, there are organizations like The Open Planning Project (TOPP), or Front Seat, or my own DIYcity, working alongside these open gov groups, trying to make the whole civic system work better. Or there is Robin Chase, CEO of GoLoco and founder of ZipCar, singlehandedly trying to reinvent the way transportation works in cities. Or there is the subway alert I just got in my inbox, courtesy of New York City's MTA, notifying me that the F train has delays due to mechanical problems. All of these entities--TOPP, Front Seat et al, plus the open gov groups--are interrelated, and together create a new, emerging ecosystem of information, user activity, and possibility. But that ecosystem doesn't fit neatly under the hood of "Gov 2.0" or any of the other "gov" labels.

Recalling my post last week about the four pillars of an open civic system, these "gov" names--e-gov, gov2.0, open gov--focus on the G2C aspect of what is going on, to the exclusion of the other aspects of this open civic system that is emerging.

And this new civic system should have a name, because it is a real ecosystem. It is also a movement, with more and more people focusing on it around the world every day. It is also increasingly becoming an industry.

So what do we call this new thing?

What do we say when we want to say to someone, "All of the stuff that is emerging right now in the civic space that helps communities operate better, both with and without direct or indirect involvement on the part of the government?"

I was talking with Micah Sifry, co-host of this week's Personal Democracy Forum, a while back, and he suggested the name "civic software" for the apps that come out of this space. Riffing off that, I have been talking about the "open civic system." Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, who recently posted on this movement, thinks that name is too long, but also thinks "civic software" doesn't quite do it justice.

So I thought I would open up a thread here on Radar for a discussion:

What should this new space be called?

Let me know what you think. All ideas are welcome...

Four short links: 18 June 2009

Weaker Copyright Good, YQL.gov, GeoSPARQL, Happiness

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 3

1. Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society (Michael Geist) -- Given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that "weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society." This is consistent with the authors' view that weaker copyright is "uambiguously desirable if it does not lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies to produce new works." (read the original paper)
2. Using Public Data for Good With the Power of YQL -- The first part is a new batch of YQL tables providing data on the U.S. government, earthquake data, and the non-profit micro-lender Kiva. The second part is an incredibly easy way to render YQL queries on websites. After all, what good is data that no one can see?
3. GeoSPARQL -- RDF meets geo goodness. SELECT ?s ?p ?o WHERE { ?s gn:name "Dallas" . ?s ?p ?o } (via the geowanking mailing list)
4. How To Be Happy in Business -- this Venn diagram makes me happy. (via Ned Batchedler)

The Four Pillars of an Open Civic System

by John Geraci | @johngeraci | comments: 15

Everyone is talking a lot about open government and transparency these days. It's exhilarating stuff, and it's even more exciting to see governments get behind it, creating sites like data.gov in the U.S. for the public to access government information via APIs. But every time I hear someone say something like "our organization is really into transparency" (which is often) it sounds odd to me. It's only talking about a part of the puzzle, not the whole puzzle. What we really want (or what I really want anyway) is not simply government transparency, but an open civic system - a civic system that operates, and flourishes, as a fully open system, for whatever level we happen to be talking about - federal, state, city, neighborhood, whatever. And transparency is a big part of that open civic system, but it is still only one part.

In fact there are four parts to a functioning open civic system. These are:

Government to Citizen (G2C). This is what people speak of when they talk about transparency and open government data. It's the idea of creating open pipelines for data directly from government and gov't agencies to whoever is interested in receiving it. G2C gets you accountability - watchdog groups suddenly have easy access to the paper trails for everything that is going on, etc. It also gets you things like transit schedules, minutes from meetings, and zoning data - things that can be built on by third parties to make the civic system work better. G2C is critical stuff, but without the other three components in place, we can't make the most of this open government data. What we need is not simply a pipe of open data, we need an ecosystem of open civic data, all interconnected, all flowing every which way. That's what the other three "pillars" of an open civic system gets us.

Citizen to Government (C2G). The counterpart to G2C. This is the idea of creating open pipelines from the people directly to the government - hopefully with someone listening on the other end. Adding C2G to G2C completes the circuit and makes open government APIs and such that much stronger - it takes what was a uni-directional data flow and turns it into a feedback loop of information, input and output. At the city level, C2G is taking shape right now in the form of Open 311 - a open API that anyone can build on that allows residents to create "problem tickets" for their city to address one way or another. Washington D.C. is currently launching an open 311 API, and I expect more cities will follow suit soon. Other examples of C2G include UK's FixMyStreet and SeeClickFix.com from New Haven, Connecticut, both sites with a huge amount of potential. There are a million different, nuanced ways C2G could be played out, at the local, state and federal levels.

Citizen to Citizen (C2C). Okay so now we have both open G2C and C2G data flows going, and that's great - huge amplification of civic activity, great realization of efficiency with regards to interaction between government and people. But there are all sorts of ways to improve civic life that don't really need to involve the government at all - what about those things? That's where Citizen to Citizen, or C2C, data flows come in. C2C is the citizens' brigade of data flow - it's the people doing it for themselves, whatever "it" happens to be. Clever Commute, in New Jersey, is one example of a great C2C data flow. Everyone who commutes by train into NYC subscribes to the Clever Commute feed, and then notifies each other of what the current delays are, and where, each morning. The system works better than anything New Jersey Transit has been able to pull together, and at a cost of essentially zero. This is the great thing about C2C - it is added value to the civic system at no additional cost to the system itself. The cost to operate C2C is passed on to those who are using it, and spread out amongst individuals, to the point where the costs become negligible. Instead of New Jersey Transit coming up with a system that knows how late each of its trains are at a cost of millions of tax dollars, the users of Clever Commute bear the cost of the system, and it costs pennies for each user to operate (the cost of sending a text message). C2C is a huge value-add on top of G2C and C2G, and as governments consider how to get increased services in these recessionary times, I expect C2C to be huge - once governments get used to the idea.

Government to Government (G2G). Lastly, the square is not complete without open Government-to-Government data flows. Entities within governments should have easy, open data exchange with each other, without having to issue a request, parse something out of a PDF, and so forth. The ability for, say, the NYC Department of Health to get data from the Los Angeles DoH in realtime, without having to talk to anyone or issue a request could be a huge asset. Or think of the efficiencies that could be gained if the NYC DOT were able to exchange realtime data with the NYPD. If these examples sound vague, it's because G2G is the "pillar" I know the least about, having never worked in a government agency. From what I've learned though, it seems to me that there could be a huge increase to civic utility with a little bit of thought about an open G2G system.

And of course you can blend these data flows and come up with hybrids all you like. DIYcity's SickCity, for example, is basically a C2C tool in its present, basic 1.0 incarnation - it detects instances of residents in your city saying they're sick, and passes that news on to other residents. But a more sophisticated version of the tool would also pass that information on directly to the Department of Health when relevant, and would also, optimally, accept data from the DoH to pass that back to residents. Suddenly it has gone from a simple C2C tool to a tool that is C2C, C2G and G2C. Now we're talking about interesting stuff. Each additional channel of data makes the system exponentially more valuable.

With all of these systems properly developed and engaged, our civic systems - local, regional, federal - should bloom and transform into the properly modern, Internet-age things they ought to be. This will translate to increases in efficiency, greater innovation and rate of change, better adaptability, and greater resilience, in addition to other advantages. To get there though, we've got to get beyond thinking simply in terms of transparency and government APIs.

Four short links: 28 May 2009

Mobile Viruses, Open Data, Twitter Bookmarks, Sexy Geek Skills

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Viral Epidemics Poised to go Mobile -- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (author of Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else) modelled mobile phone virus epidemiology for NSF and concluded that (in accordance with experience) no single OS has critical mass for viruses to break-out. I wonder: will Android or iPhone reach that point first? (via ACM TechNews)
2. Socrata -- formerly "Blist", the first of what will undoubtedly be many startups "refocusing" attempting to profit from the new US administration's fondness for Web 2.0. The business model, however, is "we'll offer your data to citizens in a useful form" and it seems to me that this is a responsibility that Government should embrace rather than outsource. (via Jesse)
3. Tag This -- tweet @tagthis with a link and keywords to post the link as bookmark in your Delicious/Magnolia account.
4. Three Sexy Skills of Geeks -- statistics, data munging, and visualization. I'm reading Visualizing Data right now and expect the universe to bury me in bootie before the day is out. "Processing: it's cheaper than couple's therapy and you can post pictures of it on the Internet without being fired." (via mattb on Twitter)

Four short links: 27 Apr 2009

Data centers, open research, Jeopardy!, and tombstones

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 5

1. Google Server and Data Center Details -- Greg Linden reports on a Efficient Data Center Summit. Google uses single volt power and on-board uninterruptible power supply to raise efficiency at the motherboard from the norm of 65-85% to 99.99%. There is a picture of the board on slide 17. (and this is a 2005 board). Greg has left Microsoft as Live Labs is dissolved.
2. The Economics of Open Access Publishing -- set of papers on the free distribution of research. Pointed to by the RePEc blog. RePEc is Research Papers in Economics, a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 67 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components. All RePEc material is freely available. (via Paul Reynolds)
3. Computer Program to Take On Jeopardy! (NY Times) -- move over Turing Test, IBM's working on the Trebek Test: a computer program to compete against human “Jeopardy!” contestants. If the program beats the humans, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward. Really? The system must be able to deal with analogies, puns, double entendres and relationships like size and location, all at lightning speed. Oh, ok. So it's more complex than inverting the hash table of questions and answers. (via ericries on Twitter)
4. The Value of Minimal Data (Powerhouse Museum) -- if you have the ability for passionate users to contribute their knowledge, they can turn "minimal" data into a delicious four course data feast with a vintage port to sip during the dessert course. (via sebchan on Twitter)

Four short links: 14 Apr 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

Open data, lean startups, RSS-as-newspaper, and a design call to arms:

1. OpenSecrets Goes Open Data -- The following data sets, along with a user guide, resource tables and other documentation, are now available in CSV format (comma-separated values, for easy importing) through OpenSecrets.org's Action Center [...] : CAMPAIGN FINANCE: 195 million records dating to the 1989-1990 election cycle, tracking campaign fundraising and spending by candidates for federal office, as well as political parties and political action committees; LOBBYING: 3.5 million records on federal lobbyists, their clients, their fees and the issues they reported working on, dating to 1998; PERSONAL FINANCES: Reports from members of Congress and the executive branch that detail their personal assets, liabilities and transactions in 2004 through 2007; 527 ORGANIZATIONS: Electronically filed financial records beginning in the 2004 election cycle for the shadowy issue-advocacy groups known as 527s.
2. The Lean Startup Presentation at Web 2.0 -- with audio. I've raved about Eric Ries blog before.
3. Times -- an RSS feedreader with a newspaper's layout. News reading can be improved and newspapers are in the middle of dying, so it makes sense that someone would try a face transplant. I'm not convinced that the newspaper's front page is the model for perfect news delivery, although I do love the ultimate in dense news layouts: Arts & Letters Daily. (via joshua's delicious feed)
4. Designing Through a Depression (NY Times blog) -- exhortation to work on stuff that matters. This rethinking needs to come not just from designers but from the manufacturers, companies and other clients who decide what products and projects will be produced. There’s no excuse not to examine and re-examine what’s made, how it’s manufactured, what materials are used (and which are recyclable), what benefit it’s giving the consumer (or lack thereof) and what contribution, if any, it’s making to anything other than landfill. I believe recessions are when good things flourish.

The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory

by John Geraci | @johngeraci | comments: 15

Guest blogger John Geraci has spent the last six years making life in cities better with the use of web technologies. His latest project, DIYcity.org, has web developers and urban planners all over the world teaming up to create open source tools for residents of cities everywhere. Prior to DIYcity, Geraci co-founded the hyperlocal news network Outside.in.

Back in January, the city of Los Angeles announced a gap of $433 million for their 2009 budget. Instead of just cutting services however, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took the unusual step of posting a survey online for residents of the city to fill out. For each category of city service, the survey asked residents, "what program would you reduce to help balance the budget?", followed by an itemized list of services they could choose from.

It was in one sense a remarkable sign of the new openness and desire for participation sweeping government all over the U.S.

In another sense though it begged a larger question: if you're going to involve city residents in these issues, why stop at asking people which services they would like to cut? Why not go a bit further and ask them for input on how to keep these services, while making them leaner, more efficient, and smarter? And why not then ask for their help in making those changes happen?

These are questions cities everywhere should be asking today, as they find themselves faced with the challenge of gigantic budget shortfalls brought on by the recession. The conversation about the future of our cities should involve the people living in those cities. But it should not be about which services to eliminate, it should be about how to reinvent these services as modern, efficient things, how to make them work at a fraction of their current cost, and, while we're at it, how to make them better than they are now.

Why? Because cities don't have the money to improve, or even sustain these services on their own. Because people have good ideas, often more innovative than the ones coming from the cities themselves. And because increasingly, people have the means to actually build and implement these services - not as centralized, closed, top-down systems we think of as public services today, but as distributed, participatory web-based systems built using data open to all.

(continue reading)

Request for ideas: Crowdsourcing the Evolution of Congressional Websites

by Mike Honda | comments: 21

Guest blogger Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, serves in the U.S. Congress on the House Appropriations subcommittee on the Legislative Branch.

Tim recently asked readers of this blog to help provide me with guidance on the best way to make official legislative databases available to the developer community. The question, which also made its way onto Slashdot, led to a wealth of proposals, some of which I am considering developing into new legislation. Following on the success of that initial conversation, I’d like to ask for your guidance once again.

How can Congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government? Instead of viewing the public as a customer for services, I believe that we should empower citizens to become our partners in shaping the future of our nation.

Sites like stimuluswatch.org, for example, have shown how the public can advise officials on which elements of the economic recovery program are most effective in creating jobs and resuscitating our struggling economy. Together we can identify and cut ineffective government programs and simultaneously support cost effective initiatives that maximize Return On Investment.

Websites like these only become possible when government data (in this case a list of project requests from the US Council of Mayors) is repurposed to enable public participation. Until more government databases become available, however, the full potential of web 2.0 technologies will remain unfulfilled. A dramatic shift in perspective is needed before that need can be met. Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.

As one leading e-government expert recently advised:

Free your data, especially maps and other geographic information, plus the non-personal data that drives the police, health and social services, for starters. Introduce a ‘presumption of innovation’ – if someone has asked for something … give them what they want: it’s probably a sign that they understand the value of your data when you don’t.

My constituents in Silicon Valley understand how opening up data can catalyze dramatic innovation, and I recently enacted legislation to provide free public access to legislative databases with that goal in mind. It is my hope that this information can foster the development of initiatives to empower the public to collaborate with and provide advice to Members of Congress. No longer will individuals simply petition their representatives – instead you should be our most valued advisors.

Government 2.0 is an achievable goal, and together we can make it a reality. In fact, I recently began a comprehensive redesign of my website with the goal of developing new and unprecedented ways of collaborating with my constituents.

To solicit ideas for the new website, I sent my Online Communications Director to a conference to lead a website brainstorming session. That conversation resulted in several intriguing proposals, including the suggestion that I post my hearing schedule for the week so that my constituents could propose questions for me to ask of witnesses.

The success of that session, and the quality of your answers to the last question I posted here, gives just a hint of the possibilities that can result from greater partnership between elected officials and the public. While I may not be able to implement every idea that is suggested, I do plan on providing a list of the most innovative ideas to my fellow Members of Congress.

What features could I implement on my website to tap into the wisdom of the crowds?

• Propose an idea
• View submitted ideas
• Join our conversation on twitter using the #honda2.0 tag

With your help we can empower the public to partner with Representatives in improving the policies of our nation. Let’s begin making Gov 2.0 a reality.

- Mike

Four short links: 12 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

Programming language security, robot laws, open data platform, and telephony recharged:

1. Languages and Security Reading (Ivan Krstić) -- I love his tripartite division of language security work, as it completely gels with my experience. 1. The “My name is Correctness, king of kings” people say that security problems are merely one manifestation of incorrectness, which is dissonance between what the program is supposed to do and what its implementation actually does. This tends to be the group led by mathematicians, and you can recognize them because their solutions revolve around proofs and the writing and (automatic) verification thereof.
2. High Time to Act on Armed Robots (New Scientist) -- Philosopher A.C. Grayling (of whom I only know from his appearances on In Our Time) has written an interesting piece calling for us to start talking about the rules and regulations around robots. Not because of any fear they'll enslave mankind, but because we deal with the possibility that people "malfunction" through procedures, expectations, rules, and the law. We don't think much about the failure modes of robots in life, but even less about the legal status of such malfunctions--if an autonomous military robot kills its own soldiers, who is responsible? What are the odds of this happening? This is related to PW Singer's Wired For War. (via Mind Hacks)
3. Guardian's Open Data Platform -- Everyday we work with datasets from around the world. We have had to check this data and make sure it’s the best we can get, from the most credible sources. But then it lives for the moment of the paper’s publication and afterward disappears into a hard drive, rarely to emerge again before updating a year later. So, together with its companion site, the Data Store - a directory of all the stats we post - we are opening up that data for everyone. Whenever we come across something interesting or relevant or useful, we’ll post it up here and let you know what we’re planning to do with it. They're publishing all this data via Google Spreadsheets, and have a content API to fetch stories. Sample content app built the first day it was public: Guardian + Lucene = Similar Articles + Categorisation I fetched the 13,000 articles categorised as 'Science', fed them to Solr, and used that to generate similar articles and their categories. so if you liked an article you can get another like it. Guardian just put data on universities into their data store. (Via Simon Willison, who worked on it).
4. Grand Central to Finally Launch as Google Voice (TechCrunch) -- the breathless fawning servile prose of this fellatial article aside, it's wonderful to see telephony apps getting press again (even gush). New features include voicemail transcription, which has to be the new "must have" feature for people like me who live and die (most often die) by the inbox. Voicemail is so due for a reboot, just as much as email.

GeoData Explorations: Open Street Map's Growth

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 6

Open Street Map (OSM), the open data mapping project, has grown a lot over the past year. It now has almost 80,000 users and 800 million data points.

OSM's data is still freely available, but commercial services around it have sprung up. Cloudmade is a startup that recently moved from the UK to San Francisco to be closer to investors and try to build up their US data. GeoFabrik is a German startup with similar plans (just focused on Germany). Flickr has been making use of it lately to supplement Yahoo's Mapping data (specifically Black Rock City, Beijing, Kabul and Baghdad).

The above image is Planet - A Year Of Edits On OpenStreetMap. It was generated on November 23rd, 2008 by Peter Ito. Most of the growth occurred in Europe (where the project originated) and the United States (where the founder has moved). The US community has really picked up the pace and has started replacing the US government's free TIGER data set. You can see images of the data edits in the US for October and November and an animation of the world's edits.

This cartogram shows the distribution of POIs (Points of Interest) in the OSM data set. The UK and Germany have a disproportionate amount of data compared to their land mass (but obviously not compared to their OSM users). This image was released on 11/7 on the Cloudmade blog.

If you're not familiar with cartograms go explore Worldmapper, it's an amazing site filled with them. Or make your own with the same software.

The above graph shows the number of registered (and presumably contributing) OSM users and the number of uploaded track points. The user growth is similar to the early Wikipedia years, but it's uncertain whether OSM will be able to match Wikipedia's amazing growth. Uploading GPS tracks or editing geo data is a higher user barrier than editing an article. The user's have to register and use complicated tools (though Potlatch, the online editor, attempts to even the playing field).

If you want to see the people behind the map all of their names are available in this short animation. You can see other OSM stats in their wiki.

This is the latest GeoData Explorations post, also see GeoData Explorations: Google's Ever-Expanding Geo Investment. If you have geodata to share (for a future post) let me know in the comments.