Posted on Friday, December 11, 2009 6:00:00 AM
It's Official, data.gov 2.0 is Coming -- pointer to the design and philosophy document for the next iteration of data.gov. Interesting to see so much activity on US open government happening now: open government directive and progress report were released, along with a request for ideas on open access to publicly-funded science research. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Posted on Thursday, December 10, 2009 3:42:41 PM
On November 25th, Wikileaks released 500,000 text pager intercepts from the 24 hours surrounding the horrific 9/11 attacks. The personal, corporate and governmental come from the Washington D.C. and New York City areas. These can be found on their own subdomain at http://911.wikileaks.org/ and are released under the CC-BY-SA license. As with the AOL search logs and the Enron email archives this data set will be examined and visualized.
Posted on Thursday, December 10, 2009 6:00:00 AM
Scriblio -- open source CMS and catalogue built on WordPress, with faceted search and browse. (via titine on Delicious) Scriblio is an award winning, free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress. Scriblio is a project of Plymouth State University, supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Posted on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 6:00:00 AM
Nebul.us -- startup that aggregates and visualises your online activity. In private beta, but there's a screenshot and brief discussion on Flowing Data. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Posted on Tuesday, December 8, 2009 10:00:00 PM
Google is releasing v2 of GWT (pronounced "Gwit") tonight at a Campfire One in Mountain View. The open-source Google Web Toolkit enables developers to code Ajax web apps in Java. This latest release is focused on speed (just like the latest iPhone) and improved dev-designer collaboration. I was on a call with Bruce Johnson and Andy Bowers to learn more about the release. There are three new major features being released tonight. Of the three SpeedTracer seems to have the greatest implications.
Posted on Tuesday, December 8, 2009 6:00:00 AM
Python's Moratorium -- Python language designers have declared a moratorium on enhancement proposals (feature requests) while the world's Python programmers get used to the last batch of New And Shiny they shipped. I'm reasonably sure that the ALGOL designers went through exactly the same discussions, and I know Perl did too. So, don't be afraid of it - don't think that Python is evolutionarily dead - it's not. We're taking a stability and adoption break, a breather. We're doing this to help users and developers, not to just be able to say 'no' to every random idea sent to python-ideas, and not because we're done. Reminds me of Perl god Jarkko Hietaniemi's signature file: "There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Posted on Monday, December 7, 2009 1:34:02 PM
This is the sixth post for the Twitter Approval Matrix with data that spanned the month of November and different sources such as klout.com, tweetsentiment.com, twopular.com, scraping archives, and observations. This month I received help from Joe Fernandez the CEO of Klout.com. I have included Twitter Trends which is simply the raw trend found on Twitter. The matrix shows four quadrants used to describe trends found on Twitter.
Posted on Monday, December 7, 2009 6:00:00 AM
3D Touchscreens -- Japan Science & Technology Agency and researchers at the University of Electro-communications have made a "photoelastic" touch screen. The LCD emits polarized light, picked up by a camera over the screen. Transparent rubber on the screen deforms when pressed, and the camera can pick this up. Interesting hack, though it's not yet a consumer-grade product. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Posted on Friday, December 4, 2009 4:30:00 PM
Readability -- bookmarklet that takes the crap out of a web page, resizes, and reformats so it's easier to read. Doesn't work for all sites, but it's a hellishly interesting idea. An In-Depth Look at Pivot, Microsoft's Newest Data Visualization Tool (TechCrunch) -- When turned on, Pivot can also make sense of your own browsing history (if you are...
Posted on Thursday, December 3, 2009 8:37:45 PM
In my Twitter stream today, Sylvia Martinez (@smartinez) retweeted a link to Seymour Papert's 1980 paper written for a Presidential commission that proposed that we provide a computer for every child in America. Long before One Laptop Per Child, Papert saw that computers should not be an "auxiliary" aid to learning but "fundamental" to changing how we learn. He understood that the computer by changing education could change our culture for the better. After thirty years, Papert's call for action is still fresh today.
Posted on Thursday, December 3, 2009 4:00:54 PM
If for no other reason than the 'Anyone but Apple' crowd needs an alternative, there is an 'inevitability' meme associated with Google's Android initiative. But, is their success in the market really inevitable? Over a year after Android's launch, the jury is still out.
Posted on Thursday, December 3, 2009 6:00:00 AM
How Robber Barons Hijacked the Victorian Internet (ArsTechnica) -- cautionary tale of the exploitation of a monopoly. Once installed as the dominant proprietor of the nation's telegraph system, public trust in the confidentiality of Western Union transmissions evaporated. Gould "scanned the telegraph, or manipulated it, as an open book to the secrets of all the marts," Josephson wrote.
Posted on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 7:14:54 PM
Surveys show us cocooning ourselves in worlds of
information that reinforce our existing prejudices. It's not enough to
read opposing viewpoints because our assumptions and interpretive
lenses differ. When we get tired of power plays, we'll start
communicating.
Posted on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 6:00:00 AM
8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight -- Sprint set up a self-service portal for law enforcement and returned 8 million requests for cellphone GPS locations in the first year. This is an incredibly comprehensive analysis of published and revealed numbers of surveillance--it's orders of magnitude larger than anyone had realised. See also the leaked law enforcement howtos from Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo!. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Posted on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 4:00:14 AM
I recently sat down with Roger Magoulas, Director of Research at O'Reilly to talk about what he is paying attention to these days. I thought we would do a single, quick segment for Radar. I was mistaken. I have broken out the interview into several parts and will release them weekly... Call it Wednesdays with Roger. This episode touches on new devices that will shape how we work and get things done in the future including Pico projectors and OLED screens.