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The iPhone: Tricorder Version 1.0?
By James TurnerNovember 17, 2009
The iPhone, in addition to revolutionizing how people thought about mobile phone user interfaces, also was one of the first devices to offer a suite of sensors measuring everything from the visual environment to position to acceleration, all in a package that could fit in your shirt pocket. On December 3rd, O'Reilly will be offering a one-day online edition of the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on the iPhone sensors, and what you can do with them. Alasdair Allan (the University of Exeter and Babilim Light Industries) and Jeffrey Powers (Occipital) will be among the speakers, and I recently spoke with each of them about how the iPhone has evolved as a sensing platform and the new and interesting things being done with the device.
Four short links: 12 November 2009
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 12, 2009
Fat Free CRM -- open source (Affero GPL) Ruby on Rails CRM system. Bixo -- open source data mining toolkit that runs as a series of pipes on top of Hadoop. Built on Cascading workflow system for Hadoop that hides MapReduce. (via kdnuggets) Andy Kessler's Keynote at Defrag Stank (Pete Warden) -- I'm sorry to hear it, because I...
Four short links: 30 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 30, 2009
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) Google Wave: We Came, We Saw, We Played D&D (ArsTechnica) -- gamers using...
Four short links: 28 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 28, 2009
GMail Labs: Got The Wrong Bob? -- When's the last time you got an email from a stranger asking, "Are you sure you meant to send this to me?" and promptly realized that you didn't? Looks at the clusters of CCs you send and, if you normally send to Bob X but are trying to send it to Bob...
Four short links: 26 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 26, 2009
Toiling in the Data Mines -- Tom Armitage describes the process that Berg calls "material exploration". Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that's a shame. Material explorations are something I've really only done since I've joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar - in that they were very, very different...
Four short links: 23 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 22, 2009
Information is Beautiful -- gorgeous descriptions of the design of infographics. For once, a design discussion that might be useful to mere mortals like me. Australian Teen Crafts "Sneaky" Games -- video interview with a 16 year-old winner of the IFTF, Sun, and BoingBoing Digital Open. Great to see game design, a topic we've followed on Radar, getting uptake...
The Fun Theory
By Linda StoneOctober 20, 2009
Play is how our passions find us. Play is where failure isn't failure and isn't emotionally charged. Play is all about iteration and we iterate on the emerging questions that arise from within us and that we are driven to understand.
George Dyson's "Among the Machines" in Mountain View
By Dale DoughertyOctober 19, 2009
Science historian, author and Make columnist George Dyson will give a lecture tonight on the "Evolution of Technology: Darwin Among the Machines." The talk will be at 7 p.m. at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Mountain View. The talk is part of a series hosted by NASA Ames centered around the concept of evolution in...
Four short links: 15 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 15, 2009
Open Access Week -- world-wide, dedicated to raising awareness of open access to research. (via Creative Commons Aotearoa). 1Mb Broadband Access Becomes Legal Right -- Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection. The Elements of Statistical Learning 2ed -- classic book (I have the 1st edition) that is now available...
A More Public Role for Public Broadcasting: Education
By Dale DoughertyOctober 9, 2009
Imagine a broadcast network in America that was dedicated to education, where the best educators had the opportunity to produce its programming, and where individuals as well as institutions could develop a new genre of wide-ranging educational programs? Educational programming could elevate the role of teaching in our culture and promote the value of lifelong learning. This blog post explores...
Four short links: 30 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 30, 2009
Smart Materials in Architecture -- Using thermal bimetals can allow architects to experiment with shape-changing buildings, Ritter said. Thermal bimetals include a combination of materials with different expansion coefficients that can cause a change in. Under changing temperatures this can lead one side of a compound to bend more than the other side, potentially creating an entirely different shape,...
Four short links: 28 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 28, 2009
Sci Blogs -- aggregated and hosted blogs from New Zealand scientists and researchers. A planet aggregator has become a key part of building a community, even outside programming. Super Better, or How To Turn Recovery Into a Game -- Jane McGonigal had a concussion, and created a game to keep her doing things that aided her recovery. Interesting discussion...
Chapter-by-chapter coverage of Masterminds of Programming
By Andy OramSeptember 24, 2009
Programmer Taran Rampersad planned all along to write a review of Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages--but his reading impressed him so much he ended up writing a review for each chapter.
Four short links: 26 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 26, 2009
Better BBQ Through Chemistry -- food is the perfect ground for geek training: there are measurements, there's science, it's easy to know whether you've succeeded, and you can eat all but the worst of your failures. (via BoingBoing) NoSQL (East) -- conference on East Coast for relationless databases. Human Brain Processing Speed -- clocked at 60bits/second, according to this...
Four short links: 10 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 10, 2009
The Propaganda Newspapers -- London councils increasingly providing their own newspapers, masquerading as mass-market popular appeal newspapers but without anything critical of the council that produces it. This is an evolutionary dead-end for reinventing newspapers, and is why the non-profit/trust structure works so well. Time for Computer Science to Grow Up -- publish in journals so conferences can be...
Four short links: 30 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 30, 2009
iPhone App v1.3 Released -- revealing glimpse into how third-party apps (such as this iPhone app, built on the Brooklyn Museum's API) reflect on the institution providing the API. Brooklyn Museum has dealt with this sensitively and intelligently, a model to all. As always, I want to marry the Brooklyn Museum and raise a posse of online apps. Embrace...
Four short links: 29 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 29, 2009
Bioweathermap -- crowdsourcing the gathering of environmental samples for DNA sequencing to study the changing distribution of microbial life. Another George Church project. (via timoreilly at Twitter) We Are All African Now -- a great article about our genetic history and the computational genomics that makes it possible. (via Tim Bray) Standing Out In The Crowd -- OSCON keynote...
Wikipeadia Papers - How to improve Wikipedia and University Studies Quality
By Mark FinnernJuly 15, 2009
How to bring Wikipedia up to the scientific standard that many in the Universities are claiming it is missing: The Wikipedia Paper. Every student that takes a class, no matter what topic, has to create or improve a Wikipedia page of the Topic of the class.
Four short links: 15 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 14, 2009
Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor (PNAS) -- We found that a trader's morning testosterone level predicts his day's profitability. We also found that a trader's cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas...
Four short links: 29 June 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJune 29, 2009
Server Fault -- Wikipedia-like sysadmin guide, built by the Stack Overflow team, who are branching out to reach a more general IT Professional audience. (via Brady in email) Sixty Symbols -- 5m videos about the symbols of physics and astronomy. Great stuff! (via Glutnix on Twitter) US National Archives launches YouTube Channel -- a mixture of archives-nerd stuff (directors...
Four short links: 22 June 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJune 22, 2009
Half of All Friends Replaced Every 7 Years -- to put it another way, the half-life of friendship is 7 years. (via zephoria on delicious) Crowdsourced Car Design -- an interesting approach, and I can imagine it being described as "threadless for cars". (via timoreilly on Twitter) Australian Gov 2.0 Taskforce -- The Aussies are getting their Gov 2.0...
Nikola Tesla--The Man Who Lit Up the World - An Excerpt from The Geek Atlas
By Sara PeytonMay 28, 2009
The history of science is all around us, if you know where to look. And if you're a traveler who loves science, you'll definitely want to check out at a timely new resource from O'Reilly, The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive ($29.99), by John Graham-Cumming. Arriving just in time for summer vacation planning, this unique travelers' guide covers 128 interesting destinations around the globe where major breakthroughs in science, mathematics, or technology occurred--or are happening now. Read about the Tesla Museum, in Belgrade, Serbia in this excerpt from The Geek Atlas now.
Social Science Moves from Academia to the Corporation
By Joshua-Michele RossMay 21, 2009
This is the latest of a series of posts addressing questions regarding social technologies. These topics will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27 with a special guest to be announced. In order to control a thing you must first classify that thing -- and we are seeing a massive classification of social behavior. While that classification falls under the guise of making life easier (targeted ads, locating a nearby pizza joint using your mobile), history tells us that we should be leery of the motives driving the masters of our social data (see Captivity of the Commons). Social sciences (behavioral psychology, sociology, organizational development), whose historical lack of data and scientific method left them open to ridicule from the “hard” sciences, finally have enough volume of data and analytics and processing power (see Big Data) to make “social” much more scientific.
Four short links: 21 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 21, 2009
Us Now -- UK documentary, available streaming or on DVD, about how open government and digital democracy makes sense. It's good to watch if you've not thought about how government could be positively changed by technology, but I don't think it's radical enough in the future it describes. It's Gonna Be The Future Soon -- great video for the...
Four short links: 18 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 18, 2009
Scientists Without Borders -- "Mobilizing Science, Improving Lives". mobilize and coordinate science-based activities that improve quality of life in the developing world. The research community, aid agencies, NGOs, public-private partnerships, and a wide variety of other institutions are already promoting areas such as global health, agricultural progress, and environmental well-being, but current communication gaps restrict their power. Organizations and...
Space Shuttle Atlantis during Solar Transit
By Jesse RobbinsMay 17, 2009
In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault) Thierry made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D...
Four short links: 15 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 15, 2009
Whither Sockets? -- ACM Queue article on how sockets as a model for network programming have become an obstacle to where networking is going. All of these calls have one thing in common: the calling program must repeatedly ask for data to be delivered. In the world of client/server computing these constant requests make perfect sense, because the server...
Four short links: 6 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 5, 2009
Hamster Wheel Maps -- Jack Schulze has created an interesting way to see the world, in the form of "horizonless maps". The city unfolds in front of you like it was built on the inside of a hamster wheel and you're the hamster. Wired UK shipped an enormous foldout version. Why Pig Flu is Better Than Bird Flu: Open...
Four short links: 5 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 4, 2009
Supermap -- The CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is paying an undisclosed sum to California-based Geosemble Technologies to develop an intelligence version of the "geospatial data integration and layering technology" that the company developed for use by urban planners, real estate investors and market analysts. The technology combines overhead imagery, maps and heavy-duty data mining to create a map-based...
Personal Genome Project Expanding the Personal Gene Pool from 10 to 100,000
By Timothy M. O'BrienApril 26, 2009
The Personal Gemone Project is evolving from a small pilot of ten to a massive collection of 100,000 public medical histories and DNA sequences. Find out how you can register to participate in an experiment that will lay the necessary foundation for a complete understanding of how one's genetic sequence affects health and disease.
Four short links: 15 Apr 2009
By Nat TorkingtonApril 15, 2009
Computer archaeology, Unix, mad science, and data mining: NASA Images Saved By Volunteers -- Pictures from the mid-1960s Lunar Orbiter program lay forgotten for decades. But one woman was determined to see them restored. One woman and some keen hardware hackers who built Frankenstein's tape reader to recover the images. Not just a reminder of how ephemeral our media, but...
Four short links: 9 Apr 2009
By Nat TorkingtonApril 9, 2009
Scifi, audiences, transparency, and the peril of public life. No links tomorrow, as I'll be preparing for our village fete: The Fantastic That Denies It's Fantastic: Science Fiction Talk at the Royal Institution -- Matt Jones's fascinating notes from this talk by two academics make thought-provoking reading. “SF is a response to the cultural shock of discovering our marginal place...
Four short links: 1 Apr 2009
By Nat TorkingtonApril 1, 2009
No April Fools jokes because I'm a Grinch. Instead you get architecture, research, visualization, and pain: Stacks, Readers, Staff--Building the British Library is an overview of what a momentous accomplishment the British Library was. And a reminder that no matter how gorgeous, loved, and inevitable the final product seems, there's always a pitched battle to get it made. Architect Sir...
Four short links: 27 Mar 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMarch 27, 2009
Design, Perl, Heresy, and Ephemera: Product Panic: 2009 -- Bruce Sterling essay on design for recession-panicked consumers. As is usual with Bruce, I can't tell whether he's wryly tongue-in-cheek or literally advocating what he says. Great panic products are like Roosevelt’s fireside chats. They’re cheery bluff. The standard virtues of fine industrial design—safety, convenience, serviceability, utility, solid construction … well,...
Microsoft and Science Commons Team Up To Add Semantic Content to Online Science
By James TurnerMarch 11, 2009
John Wilbanks, VP of Science for Creative Commons, gave O'Reilly Media an exclusive sneak preview of a joint announcement that they will be making with Microsoft later today at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. According to John, who talked to us shortly after getting off a plane from Brazil, Microsoft will be releasing, under an open source license, Word plugins that will allow scientists to mark up their papers with scientific entities directly.
NASA's Kepler Promises to Irreversibly Alter Humanity's Relationship to the Cosmos
By Timothy M. O'BrienMarch 7, 2009
NASA's just launched Kepler Mission promises to dramatically expand the catalog of known exoplanets from a few hundred to a few thousand. This post assembles some information about the mission and man this mission was named after Johannes Kepler. In the words of Sagan, "Kepler was the first person in the history of the human species to understand correctly and quantitatively how the planets move, how the solar system works."
Four short links: 25 Feb 2009
By Nat TorkingtonFebruary 25, 2009
Amazon, Apple, Science, and Databases: Amazon's Wheel of Growth -- a fascinating diagram in the middle, the flywheel of customer experience driving sales driving sellers driving selection which drives experience again, and all the while lower costs allows Amazon to deliver lower prices and thus lower selection. iPhone Sketch -- stencils to use when sketching your iPhone app's screens. The...
ETech Preview: Science Commons Wants Data to Be Free
By James TurnerFebruary 19, 2009
John Wilbanks has a passion for lowering the barrier between scientists who want to share information. A graduate of Tulane University, Mr. Wilbanks started his career working as a legislative aide, before moving on to pursue work in bioinformatics, which included the founding of Incellico, a company which built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research and development. Mr. Wilbanks now serves as the Vice President of Science at Creative Commons, and runs the Science Commons project. He will be speaking at The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in March, on the challenges and accomplishments of Science Commons, and he's joining us today to talk a bit about it.
Four short links: 19 Feb 2009
By Nat TorkingtonFebruary 19, 2009
Art, astronomy and more fun for you in today's four short links: Found in Space -- there's an astronomy bot on Flickr that identifies stars in the night sky, and from the unique positions of the stars figures out what bit of the night sky is looked at and then adds notes for interesting parts of the sky visible in...
Four short links: 11.5 Feb 2009
By Nat TorkingtonFebruary 11, 2009
This second Feb 11 post was brought to you by the intersection of timezones and technology. If there's a third Feb 11 post, I'm changing my name to Bill Murray. Hacking the Earth -- an environmental futurist looks at "geoengineering", deliberately interfering with the Earth's systems to terraform the planet. Radical solution to global warming, unwise hubris and immoral act...
Four short links: 4 Feb 2009
By Nat TorkingtonFebruary 4, 2009
Data, climate change, and location: Details on Yahoo's Distributed Database (Greg Linden) -- summary of Yahoo!'s PNUTS, "a massively parallel and geographically distributed database system for Yahoo!'s web applications." Greg keeps up with the papers from the search engine companies, and the insights he offers are great. For example, "Second, as figures 3 and 4 show, the average latency of...
Free The Facts: Critical Issue, Killer Presentation
By Tim O'ReillyJanuary 25, 2009
Dave Gray's Free The Facts presentation is a must-read, must-share for anyone who cares about either science or open access. It's also a masterpiece of presentation economy, and a fantastic demonstration of how to make a text-heavy presentation into something magical. Reminiscent of the work of Michael Wesch. (It's also a fascinating demonstration of the convergence of YouTube, Flickr, and...
Four short links: 7 Jan 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 5, 2009
Draw closer around the flickering firescreen, and hear four tales of brains, words, medical improvement, and the sharp ache of the wisdom teeth of the future poking through the soft gum of the 21st century as diagnosed by Dr Sterling. Mind Bites - Flickr set of findings from neuroscience on top of beautiful photos. Mind candy meets eye candy. Dr...
Wikipedia and Nature
By Nat TorkingtonDecember 21, 2008
I love the RNA Biology journal's new guidelines for submissions, which state that you must submit a Wikipedia article on your research on RNA families before the journal will publish your scholarly article on it: This track will primarily publish articles describing either: (1) substantial updates and reviews of existing RNA families or (2) novel RNA families based on computational...
Year of Science promotes scientists' responsibility to educate
By Andy OramDecember 17, 2008
I was excited to hear of a nationwide Year of Science initiative, launched by a Boston-based conference in the first week of January. This conference will help people working in the sciences learn how to educate the wider public about what they do, why it's important, and what its implications are for public policy.
Challenges for the New Genomics
By Matt WoodDecember 8, 2008
New guest blogger Matt Wood heads up the Production Software team at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he builds tools and processes to manage tens of terabytes of data per day in support of genomic research. Matt will be exploring the intersection of data, computer technology, and science on Radar. The original Human Genome Project was completed in 2003,...
In Support of Science [and Tim]
By Nitesh DhanjaniNovember 4, 2008
Venues such as O'Reilly are not likely to discuss politics or religion often. Yet, as scientists and technologists, when we do have something to say that addresses an important topic where we can offer reasoning and critical thought - lets not be shy about it.
Incredible images of the Sun
By Jesse RobbinsOctober 15, 2008
The Boston Globe has assembled a beautiful gallery of images of the Sun. This LASCO C2 image, taken 8 January 2002, shows a widely spreading coronal mass ejection (CME) as it blasts more than a billion tons of matter out into space at millions of kilometers per hour. The C2 image was turned 90 degrees so that the blast...
Auckland University Bioengineering Institute
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 11, 2008
I am an industry advisor to the Auckland University Bioengineering Institute and got a tour on Tuesday. It was inspirational! They sprawl over several floors of a tall concrete building in Auckland, expanding from their cramped one-floor presence. Everywhere you look there are people with soldering irons, laptops, and batteries working on devices that sit between hardware and biology. I've...
Why We're Failing in Math and Science
By Tim O'ReillyAugust 15, 2008
Norman Mailer's brilliant novel Why Are We in Vietnam? doesn't talk explicitly about the Vietnam war; it tells a story about American culture and the American psyche, thereby producing a devastating critique of the war with the title and last line alone. In a similar way, it may be easier to understand why America is falling behind at math and...
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