Blog Posts

March 2009

• 2009-03-30

  How easy is it to cheat?

  I’ve gotten very interested in Election Reform lately, and I’ve delved into how the overall voting system works, technically but also politically and procedurally. There are so many simple and not so simple ways in which election results can be manipulated that it makes my head spin. I was at FooCamp this weekend and told this story to many people, so I thought I’d give some pointers to this particular example of how voters using touch screen devices could be cheated out of their vote.

  “But evidently there’s another version of the iVotronic interface in which pressing the VOTE button is only the second to last step. In those machines, pressing VOTE invokes an extra “confirmation” screen. ...

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  #politics
• 2009-03-24

  Funny: Nasa’s “Colbert Room”

  NASA’s online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry. Comedian Stephen Colbert won.

• 2009-03-24

  Thousands of lectures from top scholars – this looks GOOD!

  I spent 5 minutes perusing this site, and it looks really good. Wow, makes me want to be back in college. Now if only had time (and discipline?) to actually watch some of these lectures, that would be wonderful! Academic Earth – Thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars

  

  #education
• 2009-03-23

  Even Paul Krugman has to wait for the cable guy

  Check out this post Incommunicado, probably: "I’m working at home today, waiting for the Fios guy. Which means that I’m probably going to drop off the face of the earth for much of today." (from: from Paul Krugman)

  🙂

• 2009-03-16

  “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism”

  Clay Shirkey writes an article called “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”. I thought this was an excellent discussion about a topic I’ve written, with much less insight, in the past. For me a crucial passage of his article is: “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to st...

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  #business
• 2009-03-12

  Kindle book prices: another genius move

  Take a book that I was interested in, “The Lords of Finance”, by Liaquat Ahamed. This is a brand new book, very timely that I heard mentioned on TV. Prices:

  Sample Chapter on “Kindle” (including Kindle on iPhone): $0. I read it and thought it was really good and was tempted to buy it. But I almost never buy hardcovers so normally I would wait for it to come out in paperback.

  Hardcover, List Price: $32.95

  ...

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  #books
• 2009-03-09

  Amazon’s kindle on iPhone – Genius

  The other day, Amazon released a free application on the iPhone (and iPod Touch.) On the surface, just another ebook application. The application is free. When you run it the first thing you do is to register it to Amazon’s web site (using your normal Amazon username and password – you already have one, right?) As far as the Amazon site goes, your iPhone is a Kindle. It shows up on your list of Kindles. And you can buy books for it. So now you can visit the ...

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  #apple #books
• 2009-03-07

  A (fairly) understandable explanation of the math behind the market meltdown

  This article is somewhat mathematical but I am sure it still hugely simplifies the logic that led us astray. If you are a pop-math-head like me you will find it interesting: “For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.” (from Recipe for Disaster: The Formula that Killed Wall Street)

  

  #mathematics #business
• 2009-03-03

  The Stimulus Gets Its Own Logo

  Check out this post The Stimulus Gets Its Own Logo: "From now on, all projects associated with the simulus will be adorned with the following logo. Whatcha think? Whatever you think about Obama, you can’t argue that his team has some good graphic design skills.

  

  Of course, this isn’t the first stimulus plan to have a logo. FDR had his own for the National Recovery Administration. Obama’s is far less fascist."

  #politics
• 2009-03-02

  What I learned at Transparency Camp

  There are people in our government who are strongly pushing for more openness and who are very focused on delivering better, more modern, service to citizens. They operate under some severe constraints, in some cases from rules and regulations that seem to have become obsolete. Yet you can see where these rules came from and also see the difficulty in just deciding not to follow them. This paper, “Barriers and Solutions to Implementing Social Media in Government” is lauded by many at Transparency Camp is a very important contribution. Here’s the kind of thing it covers:

  “As the ne...

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  #politics
• 2009-03-01

  Enjoyable article about BO in the Washington Post

  “Each morning when he arrives at the Oval Office, President Obama asks his staff to deliver him a package containing 10 letters. It is a mere sampling of the 40,000 or so that Americans send to the White House every day — a barrage of advice from students and teachers, small-business owners and the unemployed.” (from Washington Post)

  The President has quite a life and quite a schedule. I couldn’t decide on the title of this post. Enjoyable article? Cool article? Interesting article? It’s worth reading, it made me feel good about what’s going on.

  

  #politics
• 2009-03-01

  Transparency Camp

  Everything’s a camp today, Foo Camp, Bar Camp and now Transparency Camp. I am attending this gathering in Washington D.C. to get closer to what’s going on in the open government movement. This is a pretty succinct summary of what it’s about: “Convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, ngos, wonks & activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.” (from Transparency Camp)

  What a new world! The degree of penetration of web 2.0, ...

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  #politics #technology

February 2009

• 2009-02-28

  Twitter Week on Portals and KM

  Bill Ives has been running “twitter week” this week on his blog Portals and KM. Here something from his concluding post: Concluding Twitter Week: Predictions on How Twitter Will Change Blogs in 2009. It has some very interesting items about the influence of twitter on blog design: “To conclude Twitter week on Portals and KM, I want to share 10 Ways Twitter Will Change Blog Design in 2009 by Rachel Cunliffe on Mashable. I am reorganizing her content to reflect its availability and then providing my thoughts in most cases.” (from Portals and KM)

• 2009-02-28

  Content Management Systems just don’t work.

  I am often asked what technology someone should use to create their web presence. I know Ruby on Rails well, but I often also recommend checking out Drupal. I know much less about Drupal but I know its reputation and I know its track record. So I’ve felt comfortable with my view. But, check this post Content Management Systems just don’t work. from Sunlight Labs blog: “I don’t think I’ve ever been happy with a content management system. I’ve tried dozens, from the ever so simple blog engines like TextPattern and WordPress, to the more complex Drupal, MovableType...

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  #technology
• 2009-02-27

  [GEEKY] Towards a DataRSS

  I wrote this short paper to formulate some ideas that have been percolating in the back of my mind for something I think of as Data Rss. Check it out here.

• 2009-02-26

  Funny piece of sh*t

  http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/onn_embed/embedded_player.swf Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

• 2009-02-26

  Flying cars yo?

  http://foxnews1.a.mms.mavenapps.net/mms/rt/1/site/foxnews1-foxnews-pub01-live/current/videolandingpage/fncLargePlayer/client/embedded/embedded.swf

• 2009-02-24

  Liquid water on mars

  “NASA’s Phoenix lander may have captured the first images of liquid water on Mars – droplets that apparently splashed onto the spacecraft’s leg during landing, according to some members of the Phoenix team.” (from Newscientist.com)

  

  #science
• 2009-02-20

  [GEEKY] Solution to something that has annoyed me

  Check out the “article: Getting “Open With” back under control.” Thanks.

• 2009-02-19

  mySociety are doing interesting stuff in the public arena

  A british organization (or should I say organisation?) called mySociety has done some really cool publically minded open source projects. Sites like FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow make so much sense and it would seem to me could easily be done here in the USA.

  How about it, shall we do it. It doesn’t seem too hard!

  Check out this post by Tom Steinberg where he muses about how they might be even able to do more: Why I Want a Million Quid:

  “One of our key insights has started to become a hindrance. We love sites like FixMyStreet partly because th...

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  #technology