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Four short links: 24 May 2013

By Nat Torkington
May 24, 2013

Ubiquity — Sears Holdings has formed a new unit to market space from former Sears and Kmart retail stores as a home for data centers, disaster recovery space and wireless towers. Google Abandons Open Standards for Instant Messaging (EFF) — …

Four short links: 13 May 2013

By Nat Torkington
May 13, 2013

Exploiting a Bug in Google Glass — unbelievably detailed and yet easy-to-follow explanation of how the bug works, how the author found it, and how you can exploit it too. The second guide was slightly more technical, so when he …

Four short links: 10 May 2013

By Nat Torkington
May 10, 2013

The Remixing Dilemma — summary of research on remixed projects, finding that (1) Projects with moderate amounts of code are remixed more often than either very simple or very complex projects. (2) Projects by more prominent creators are more generative. …

White House Science Fair praises future scientists and makers

By Alex Howard
April 29, 2013

There are few ways to better judge a nation’s character than to look at how its children are educated. What values do their parents, teachers and mentors demonstrate? What accomplishments are celebrated? In a world where championship sports teams are …

10 Questions to Ask Yourself About IT Education

By Kerry Beck
April 27, 2013

When you decide to enter the IT field or to fine-tune your skills so you’ll excel at the IT job you already have, there are some specific questions to ask yourself. Answering them will help you choose the right educational … Continue reading

Four short links: 26 April 2013

By Nat Torkington
April 24, 2013

The Engagement Cliff — Gallup surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than 1,700 public schools in 37 states in 2012 and found that by the time students get to high school only about 4 in …

Four short links: 15 April 2013

By Nat Torkington
April 15, 2013

Know Your HTTP Posters (GitHub) — A0-posters about the HTTP protocol. Crowdserfing — when a large corp uses crowd-sourced volunteering for its own financial gain, without giving back. It offends my sense of reciprocity as well, but nobody is coerced …

The Kirbster Reports Back from Pycon 2013

By Kirby Urner
April 11, 2013

(Artwork by Idan Gazit) Not all scripting languages are equal, and sometimes you may need to sell your boss on that idea. She might think, “Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP… we don’t care, what’s the difference?” Unless you’re equally happy using … Continue reading

Four short links: 2 April 2013

By Nat Torkington
April 2, 2013

Analyzing mbostock’s queue.js — beautiful walkthrough of a small library, showing the how and why of good coding. What Job Would You Hire a Textbook To Do? (Karl Fisch) — notes from a Discovery Education “Beyond the Textbook” event. The …

Four short links: 1 April 2013

By Nat Torkington
April 1, 2013

MLDemos — an open-source visualization tool for machine learning algorithms created to help studying and understanding how several algorithms function and how their parameters affect and modify the results in problems of classification, regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, dynamical systems and …

Four short links: 25 March 2013

By Nat Torkington
March 25, 2013

Analytics for Learning — Since doing good learning analytics is hard, we often do easy learning analytics and pretend that they are good instead. But pretending doesn’t make it so. (via Dan Meyer) Reproducible Research — a list of links …

Four short links: 13 March 2013

By Nat Torkington
March 13, 2013

What Tim Berners-Lee Doesn’t Know About HTML DRM (Guardian) — Cory Doctorow lays it out straight. HTML DRM is a bad idea, no two ways. The future of the Web is the future of the world, because everything we do …

Four short links: 11 March 2013

By Nat Torkington
March 11, 2013

Adventures in the Ransom Trade — between insurance, protection, and ransoms, Sean Gourley describes it as “one of the more interesting grey markets.” (via Sean Gourley) About High School Computer Science Teachers (Selena Deckelmann) — Selena gets an education in …

Four short links: 5 March 2013

By Nat Torkington
March 5, 2013

Eulerian Video Magnification — papers and the MatLab source code for that amazing effect of exaggerating small changes in file. (*This work is patent pending) CopyrightX — MOOC on current law of copyright and the ongoing debates concerning how that …

Four short links: 26 Feb 2013

By Nat Torkington
February 26, 2013

School of Data — free online courses around data science and visualization. libshorttext — classify and analyse short-text of things like titles, questions, sentences, and short messages. MIT-style open source license, Python and C++ source. Letterboxd — a site for …

Four short links: 15 February 2013

By Nat Torkington
February 15, 2013

Ed Startups in a Nutshell (Dan Meyer) — I couldn’t agree with Dan more: The Internet is like a round pipe. Lecture videos and machine-scored exercises are like round pegs. They pass easily from one end of the pipe to …

With Respect to OST’s Executive Director

By Trish Gray
February 14, 2013

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge. -Thomas Carlyle A few words I use to describe O’Reilly School of Technology’s Executive Director, Scott Gray: Brilliant. Determined. Loyal. Visionary. Authentic. Of course, I may be a bit biased, after … Continue reading

Four short links: 7 February 2013

By Nat Torkington
February 7, 2013

Tridium Niagara (Wired) — A critical vulnerability discovered in an industrial control system used widely by the military, hospitals and others would allow attackers to remotely control electronic door locks, lighting systems, elevators, electricity and boiler systems, video surveillance cameras, …

Four short links: 4 February 2013

By Nat Torkington
February 4, 2013

Hands on Learning (HuffPo) — Unfortunately, engaged and enlightened tinkering is disappearing from contemporary American childhood. (via BoingBoing) FlashProxy (Stanford) — a miniature proxy that runs in a web browser. It checks for clients that need access, then conveys data …

Welcome New Instructor and One-Man Army, John Baker

By Lorri Coey
February 2, 2013

When you hear the term one-man army, what comes to mind? When our newest HTML and JavaScript instructor, John Baker, studied under Peter Patchen at the University of Toledo, Patchen encouraged John to become a one-man army of web development. … Continue reading

Four short links: 31 January 2013

By Nat Torkington
January 31, 2013

Courier Prime — tweaked Courier “for screenplays” (!). (via BoingBoing) The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society (PDF) — education is dangerous to female extended family members. As can be seen in Table 1, when no …

Four short links: 21 January 2013

By Nat Torkington
January 21, 2013

School District Builds Own Software — By taking a not-for-profit approach and using freely available open-source tools, Saanich officials expect to develop openStudent for under $5 million, with yearly maintenance pegged at less than $1 million. In contrast, the B.C. …

Four short links: 18 January 2013

By Nat Torkington
January 18, 2013

Bruce Sterling Interview — It changed my work profoundly when I realized I could talk to a global audience on the Internet, although I was legally limited from doing that by national publishing systems. The lack of any global book …

Four short links: 17 January 2013

By Nat Torkington
January 17, 2013

Free Book Sifter — lists all the free books on Amazon, has RSS feeds and newsletters. (via BoingBoing) Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Realtime Analytics — a few key reasons why truly real-time analytics can open the …

Why I Moved Across the Country to Join OST

By Debra Woods
January 16, 2013

I joined OST as Academic Director in March 2012. It’s been a hectic ride so far to say the least, but I’ve settled in some and the new year feels like the perfect time to introduce myself and share the … Continue reading

Four short links: 16 January 2013

By Nat Torkington
January 16, 2013

Things Users Don’t Care About (Pete Warden) — every day we relearn these lessons. How great it will be once all their friends are on it. Tracer FIRE 5 — online workshop and game that teaches network security. [A] week-long …

Four short links: 28 December 2012

By Nat Torkington
December 26, 2012

Kenyan Women Create Their Own Geek Culture (NPR) — Oguya started spending some Saturday mornings with Colaco and other women, snipping code and poring through hacker cookbooks. These informal gatherings became the Akirachix. Oguya graduated and turned her mobile phone …

Four short links: 27 December 2012

By Nat Torkington
December 26, 2012

Improving the Security Posture of Industrial Control Systems (NSA) — common-sense that owners of ICS should already be doing, but which (because it comes from the NSA) hopefully they’ll listen to. See also Wired article on NSA targeting domestic SCADA …

Four short links: 21 December 2012

By Nat Torkington
December 21, 2012

Amazon’s Product Development Technique — the product manager should keep iterating on the press release until they’ve come up with benefits that actually sound like benefits. Iterating on a press release is a lot less expensive than iterating on the …

Four short links: 20 December 2012

By Nat Torkington
December 20, 2012

Use The Index, Luke — free ebook on tuning SQL database access. CamanJS — Instagram-like filters in Javascript, permissively-licensed open source. (via VentureBeat) Don’t Stick That There — USB device pretending to be a keyboard. The benefit of this is …

How do you become a data scientist? Well, it depends

By Ann Spencer
December 17, 2012

Over Thanksgiving, Richie and Violet asked me if I preferred the iPhone or the Galaxy SIII. I have both. It is a long story. My response was, “It depends.” Richie, who would probably bleed Apple if you cut him, was …

The MOOC movement is not an indicator of educational evolution

By Andy Oram
December 3, 2012

Somehow, recently, a lot of people have taken an interest in the broadcast of canned educational materials, and this practice — under a term that proponents and detractors have settled on, massive open online course (MOOC) — is getting a …

Four short links: 30 November 2012

By Nat Torkington
November 30, 2012

Kids Use Minecraft to Design School — “Students have been massively enthusiastic, with many turning up early to school to work on their Minecraft designs and they continue to do so at home too.” Also see the school’s blog. Napster, …

Investigating data journalism

By Alex Howard
November 26, 2012

Great journalism has always been based on adding context, clarity and compelling storytelling to facts. While the tools have improved, the art is the same: explaining the who, what, where, when and why behind the story. The explosion of data, …

Four short links: 26 November 2012

By Nat Torkington
November 26, 2012

High Levels of Burnout in US Drone Pilots (NPR) — 17 percent of active duty drone pilots surveyed are thought to be “clinically distressed.” The Air Force says this means the pilots’ stress level has crossed a threshold where it’s …

Four short links: 22 November 2012

By Nat Torkington
November 22, 2012

Mark Your Territory — Urine integration for Foursquare. (via Beta Knowledge) TL;DR — news summaries. Finally. Zombie Ideas and Online Instruction — The repeated return of mistaken ideas captures well my experiences with technologies in schools and what I have …

Will online learning destroy America’s colleges?

By Jon Bruner
November 20, 2012

The American college system is staggeringly large: 2,421 four-year institutions enroll about 18.5 million college students. The proportion of Americans with a bachelor’s degree is at an all-time high — a social victory if they’re able to enjoy a positive …

Four short links: 12 November 2012

By Nat Torkington
November 12, 2012

Teaching Programming to a Highly Motivated Beginner (CACM) — I don’t think there is any better way to internalize knowledge than first spending hours upon hours growing emotionally distraught over such struggles and only then being helped by a mentor. …

Four short links: 1 November 2012

By Nat Torkington
October 31, 2012

Selfstarter (Github) — open source roll-your-own crowdfunding platform. (Kickstarter has its own audience, of course, which why they could release their source-code and still be top of the heap) 100 Year Business Plan (Unlimited) — New Zealand Maori tribe has …

Welcome Jonathan “Duke” Leto

By Lorri Coey
October 30, 2012

Another OST search of the proverbial haystack has yielded success. This time it arrived to us in the form of the latest addition to our faculty, Jonathan Leto. OST has grown rapidly during the past year, offering new courses and … Continue reading

Four short links: 8 October 2012

By Nat Torkington
October 8, 2012

Beware the Drones (Washington Times) — the temptation to send difficult to detect, unmanned aircraft into foreign airspace with perceived impunity means policymakers will naturally incline towards aggressive use of drones and hyperactive interventionism, leading us to a future that …

Four short links: 1 October 2012

By Nat Torkington
October 1, 2012

Flightfox — Real people compete to find you the best flights. Crowdsourcing beating algorithms …. (via NY Times) Code Monster (Crunchzilla) — a fun site for parents to learn to program with their kids. Loving seeing so much activity around …

Four short links: 27 September 2012

By Nat Torkington
September 27, 2012

Paying for Developers is a Bad Idea (Charlie Kindel) — The companies that make the most profit are those who build virtuous platform cycles. There are no proof points in history of virtuous platform cycles being created when the platform …

Four short links: 24 September 2012

By Nat Torkington
September 24, 2012

Open Monograph Press — an open source software platform for managing the editorial workflow required to see monographs, edited volumes and, scholarly editions through internal and external review, editing, cataloguing, production, and publication. OMP will operate, as well, as a …

Four short links: 20 September 2012

By Nat Torkington
September 20, 2012

The Shape of the Internet Has Changed — 98 percent of internet traffic now consists of content that can be stored on servers. 45% of Internet traffic today is from CDNs, and a handful of them at that, which makes …

New Systems Administration Certificate Series

By Dan Bassett
September 18, 2012

The Linux/Unix Systems Administration certificate series is consistently one of the most popular OST offerings. When we initially presented the series, along with it we introduced a revolutionary new way for students to learn how to administer Linux and Unix … Continue reading

Four short links: 16 September 2012

By Nat Torkington
September 17, 2012

Aaron Swartz Defense Fund — American computer systems are under attack every day of the week from foreign governments, and the idiot prosecutor is wasting resources doubling down on this vindictive nonsense. Baghdad Community Hackerspace Workshops (Kickstarter) — Makerspace in …

OST Author has a Close Encounter on Mars with the Rover Curiosity

By Peter Scott
September 10, 2012

I’m proud to have been associated with the August 2012 landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. Since 1983 I’ve been working for and then contracting to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and I work with IT infrastructure on providing … Continue reading

Four short links: 3 September 2012

By Nat Torkington
September 3, 2012

The Seductive Allure of Edu-Tech Reform (Chris Lehmann) — While it may be seductive to think that rooms of children on computers, each following some computerized instruction at their pace, monitored by school aides, with a handful of teachers around …

Four short links: 22 August 2012

By Nat Torkington
August 22, 2012

Minecraft Experiment Devolves into Devastating Resource War — life imitates art, but artificial life imitates, well, Haiti. Finding Unity in the Math Wars — I recently heard a quote about constructive dialog: “Don’t argue the exact point a person made. …


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