O'Reilly News & Commentary

Four short links: 11 November 2011 - Technocracy's Blind Spot, Progressive Enhancement, Libraries and ebooks, and Library Fablab

By Nat Torkington
November 11, 2011

Nudge Policies Are Another Name for Coercion (New Scientist) -- This points to the key problem with "nudge" style paternalism: presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct,...

Four short links: 29 June 2011 - Crowdsourced Economics, Education Gold, Meme Analytics, Hacktivism

By Nat Torkington
June 29, 2011

Billion Prices Project -- rather than wait for official inflation figures, the BPP from MIT scans online retailer prices from around the planet. (via The Economist) Readings in Education -- Dan Meyer has linked to some of the best papers he's been reading at grad school. If you have opinions about education, or are thinking of doing something to...

Four short links: 27 June 2011 - Poor Economics, Shrinking Web, Orphans Put to Work, Realtime Log Monitoring

By Nat Torkington
June 27, 2011

Poor Economics -- this is possibly the best thing I will read all year, an insightful (and research-backed) book digging into the economics of poverty. Read the lecture slides online, they'll give you a very clear taste of what the book's about. Love that the website is so very complementary to the book, and 100% aligned with the ambition...

Four short links: 26 May 2011 - Fibre Horse, Forced Gold Farming, Google Correlate, Internet GDP

By Nat Torkington
May 26, 2011

Draft Horses Bring Fibre to Remote Locations -- I love the conjunction of old and new, as draft horses prove the best way to lay fibre in remote Vermont. (via David Isenberg) Chinese Political Prisoners Gold-Farming (Guardian) -- "Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," Liu told...

Four short links: 14 October 2010 - Google Price Index, The High Cost of Freemium, Literate Programming, Results Clustering

By Nat Torkington
October 14, 2010

Google Creates New Inflation Measure (The Guardian) -- The Google Price Index will be based on the cost of goods sold online and could use real-time search data to forecast official figures. Clever use of unique data, but can the GPI findings be reproduced by another agency? I do like the idea of moving national statistical measures into real-time....

Four short links: 26 August 2010 - Economic Growth Without Copyright, Ebook Numbers, Hypothesis Analysis Tool, Who Pays for Open Data?

By Nat Torkington
August 26, 2010

Germany's Industrial Expansion Fueled by Absence of Copyright Law? (Der Spiegel) -- fascinating article about the extraordinary publishing output in 1800s Germany vs other nations, all with no effective and enforceable copyright laws. Sigismund Hermbstädt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his...

Four short links: 10 August 2010 - Rational Smoking, Latency Poor, NLP Cites, Security Podcast

By Nat Torkington
August 10, 2010

Smoking and Ill Health: Does Lay Epidemiology Explain the Failure of Smoking Cessation Programs Among Deprived Populations? -- Here we pose the question of whether the poorer life chances of those who continue to smoke in effect constitute a rational disincentive to their avoidance or cessation of smoking. (via bengoldacre on Twitter) Scaling the New Bar for Latency in...

Four short links: 30 July 2010 - Game Mechanics, Data Privacy, Wesabe Open Source, and Monkey Economics

By Nat Torkington
July 30, 2010

The No-Twinkie Database -- These are all the Twinkie Denial Conditions described in my “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” Designer’s Notebook columns. Each one is an egregious design error, although many of them have appeared in otherwise great games. A collection of "don't do this" for app designers. (via waxy) Cloud Privacy Heat Map (Forrester) -- a map showing...

Four short links: 21 July 2010 - Health, Profit, Policy, and Semantic Web Software

By Nat Torkington
July 21, 2010

The Men Who Stare at Screens (NY Times) -- What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their...

iPhone economics and lower barriers to entry - The power of the App Store is defined by more than direct revenue.

By Andrew Odewahn
June 24, 2010

The App Store has exposed incumbents in the mobile industry to the same sort of asymmetric competition that has reshaped the media industry over the past decade. Developers are responding in droves to the economic incentives that lower barriers to entry create, as well as the fact that the App Store has generated $1 billion in royalty payments in just a few years.

Sifting Through All These Books

By Hugh McGuire
June 14, 2010

We have a massive and growing supply and demand imbalance in the book business. And, as the technologies for creating and distributing books becomes trivial, the supply of books is just going to keep growing exponentially.... How are people going to sift through all these books to find what they want?

European Union starts project about economic effects of open government data

By Andy Oram
June 11, 2010

Open source advocate Marco Fioretti has just announced the start of a study on open data for the European Union, with a focus on economic benefits for local businesses. Related surveys are also mentioned.

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