Four short links: 30 June 2009

Military Open Source, Social Govwork, Dietbot, and US IT Dashboard

1. Military Open Source Software Conference -- 12-13 August 2009 in Atlanta.
2. Govloop -- a "Social Network for Gov 2.0". Gov 2.0 could easily become the intersection of talk radio and social media consultant inanity. As with the Web 2.0 lunacy, when everyone who could spell wiki tried to sell one, you should cultivate the art of identifying and sidestepping the bozos, the time-wasters, and the charlatans who use buzzwords as a convenient alternative to thought. (via cheeky_geeky on Twitter)
3. Introducing the Autom -- a personal robot to help you lose weight. Developed by Initiative Automata as an offshoot from MIT researcher Cory Kidd, Autom has conversations that encourage you to record your diet and exercise. The theory is that the added benefit of interaction will help you stick with the diet longer, increasing the chance that it will stick. Trials showed Autom users stick with their "weight loss regimen" twice as long as pencil-and-paper. (via So, Where's My Robot?)
4. USA Government IT Dashboard Launches -- Vivek Kundra's latest project, a dashboard giving insight into government spending. Contractors, CIOs, projects, schedules, and data via an API. Built in Drupal!

Four short links: 5 June 2009

Kid Robots, US CTO, SCOTUS CSS, Javascript Infoviz

1. Visual Programming Environments for Kids -- detailed writeup of the research and coding done by Shone Sadler to build a visual programming environment for robots, so simple that kids can use it. (via steveweiss on Twitter)
2. The Nation's CTO Lays Out His Priorities -- it's still not entirely clear how the CTO and CIO's roles differ, as both are focusing on open data and "innovation platforms". CTO explicitly calls out economic growth through technology and innovation, though, which could be promising.
3. Redesigning the Government: The US Supreme Court -- the Sunlight Foundation offer a redesigned home page to the US Supreme Court, showing how it could be more useful. How long until the government's CSS is in a git repository where most people with commit access are outside the beltway?
4. Javascript Infoviz Toolkit -- Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, and more.in this Javascript suite for building data pretties. Higher-level than processing.js. (via chrisblizzard on Twitter)

Four short links: 12 Mar 2009

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.

Four short links: 12 Jan 2009

Brace yourself: kids, design, newspapers, and robots. It can only be another collection of four tasty links (or the key elements of the least successful Disney holiday movie ever).

1. Our Work So Far This Year - amazing blog entry about St Pauls high school in England, which has had exceptional technologists come to speak to their ITC class. Who? Oh, only the CEO of Arduino company tinker.it, Steven Johnson, Cory Doctorow, Gavin Starks, Phil Gyford, Tom Armitage, .... They recorded the talks and are building their own YouTube channel. The really interesting bit is at the top where they talk about the skills that their 13-year olds are coming into their ICT class with: last year they were teaching tabbed browsing to the first years, this year the first years are coming in with Firefox on a USB drive so they can keep their bookmarks wherever they go ....
2. Infinite Zoom Into Milk - a glimpse at a delectable series of books that drill into everyday items to reveal manufacturing and design decisions, materials, etc.
3. Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet - a very classy compilation of favourite blog posts and Tweets, assembled into a tabloid-sized newspaper with tastefully typesetting. Are there sufficient numbers of offline people left that it's worth producing a mainstream magazine compiled, like this, from online material? If so, how long until those economics no longer apply?
4. Anybots Launches - congrats to Trevor Blackwell, whose presence and work have graced several Foo camps. Anybots, his telepresence robot company, revealed their products at CES last week.