Yves's planet

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: LODE: An ontology for Linking Open Descriptions of Events

2012-05-17T14:17:30+00:00

domguard: From the eponym paper, bringing together multiples ontologies and approaches about time definition in RDF Linked Data

(2012-05-17 14:05)

Slashdot: Inside the 2012 Loebner Prize

2012-05-17T14:06:00+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "Not a single judge was fooled by the chatbots in the 2012 Loebner Prize, which was won by the bot Chip Vivant. According to a journalist who was a human decoy in this year's Turing Test, interactions with the humans was a tad robotic while the bots went off on crazy tangents talking about being a cat and offering condolences for the death of a pet dragon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: The Pros and Cons of IT Outsourcing: Globally, Nationally and Locally

2012-05-17T14:02:00+00:00

Outsourcing is pretty much de rigueur for modern startups looking to conserve capital. But making outsourcing work for your startup isn’t always easy. One of the first steps is figuring out where to outsource.

There are a lot of choices. The first major decision is geographical. Should you outsource locally, nationally or internationally?

My company, GrowBiz Media, has outsourced Web design and development, both internationally and locally. Believe me when I tell you each comes with its own set of pros and cons.

Here’s a quick overview:

Outsourcing Internationally

When most people think of outsourcing, they envision coders in Southeast Asia working into the wee hours of (our) night. Turns out that many factors can make global outsourcing more difficult and expensive than it appears to be at first glance.

Pros: Low cost is the primary reason most companies outsource overseas. The time difference can also be a plus: You can send your changes to your team at the end of your business day, and have the code ready when you wake up the next morning.

Cons: The old adage “you get what you pay for” often holds true. Managing people thousands of miles away is difficult at best, so when calculating costs, consider that you may need to pay someone to oversee your overseas contractors. Language or cultural barriers can add to the complexity, and different time zones can cause as many problems as they solve.

Outsourcing Nationally

Outsourcing IT within the U.S. is gaining steam. Often called rural sourcing or near-sourcing, the movement is driven partly by companies’ dissatisfaction with the quality of overseas workers and partly by a desire to bring jobs back to the U.S.

The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals named near-sourcing one of its top trends for 2012. In places like Georgia, North Carolina and Arkansas, skilled tech workers can be found for a fraction of what you’d pay in Silicon Valley or New York, according to Rural Sourcing Inc., which matches companies with workers in “second- and third-tier” cities nationwide.

Pros: Lack of cultural and language barriers make communicating with U.S. workers easier and more convenient. The time zone differential may be a slight benefit, depending on where your business and your contractors are located.

Cons: You’ll pay more for outsourcing within America than you would overseas, and if your outsourced team is across the country, meeting in person will still take time, effort and money. Be aware that some American contractors will subcontract some or all of your projects to overseas workers. This can be fine, particularly if they’re familiar with them and their work. But when this happened with one contractor we dealt with, the results were not positive.

Outsourcing Locally

After our negative experiences with outsourcing overseas, GrowBiz Media turned to a local Southern California business when it came time to rebuild our SmallBizDaily.com website.

Pros: Face time is the major advantage of working with a local company. While most of our communication still takes place by email and conference calls, when we undertake big projects or major changes, we can meet in person to brainstorm ideas and sketch out plans. Another advantage: If you do end up hiring full-time in the future, good contractors often turn into good employees.

Cons: By outsourcing to workers in your area, you’ll have to pay the going rate - which can wipe out most of the cost benefits. As with national contractors, some local firms may outsource all or part of your work overseas.

Key Questions

Since all three options come with pros and cons, how do you decide what’s best for your situation? Consider these issues:

Timeliness: Is this a rush project that simply can’t be late? If deadlines are essential, having the team accountable and close at hand could trump all other considerations.

Complexity: A simple project that doesn’t require much direction, has some “wiggle” time built into the schedule and has a bit of room for error may be most economically handled by an overseas team.

Personality: If you don’t have a problem with a more impersonal relationship with your team, overseas contractors could be fine for you. But if you’re a people person who needs face-to-face interaction, you may want to stick with local, or perhaps national, contractors.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: Strata Week: Google unveils its Knowledge Graph

Audrey Watters — 2012-05-17T13:45:00+00:00

Here's what caught my attention in the data space this week.

Google's Knowledge Graph

"Google does the semantic Web," says O'Reilly's Edd Dumbill, "except they call it the Knowledge Graph." That Knowledge Graph is part of an update to search that Google unveiled this week.

"We've always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want," writes Amit Singhal, Senior VP of Engineering, in the company's official blog post.

That post makes no mention of the semantic web, although as ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell notes, the Knowledge Graph certainly relies on it, following on and developing from Google's acquisition of the semantic database Freebase in 2010.

Mitchell describes the enhanced search features:

"Most of Google users' queries are ambiguous. In the old Google, when you searched for "kings," Google didn't know whether you meant actual monarchs, the hockey team, the basketball team or the TV series, so it did its best to show you web results for all of them.

"In the new Google, with the Knowledge Graph online, a new box will come up. You'll still get the Google results you're used to, including the box scores for the team Google thinks you're looking for, but on the right side, a box called "See results about" will show brief descriptions for the Los Angeles Kings, the Sacramento Kings, and the TV series, Kings. If you need to clarify, click the one you're looking for, and Google will refine your search query for you."

Yahoo's fumbles

The news from Yahoo hasn't been good for a long time now, with the most recent troubles involving the departure of newly appointed CEO Scott Thompson over the weekend and a scathing blog post this week by Gizmodo's Mathew Honan titled "How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet." Ouch.

Over on GigaOm, Derrick Harris wonders if Yahoo "sowed the seeds of its own demise with Hadoop." While Hadoop has long been pointed to as a shining innovation from Yahoo, Harris argues that:

"The big problem for Yahoo is that, increasingly, users and advertisers want to be everywhere on the web but at Yahoo. Maybe that's because everyone else that's benefiting from Hadoop, either directly or indirectly, is able to provide a better experience for consumers and advertisers alike."

De-funding data gathering

The appropriations bill that recently passed the U.S. House of Representatives axes funding for the Economic Census and the American Community Survey. The former gathers data about 25 million businesses and 1,100 industries in the U.S., while the latter collects data from three million American households every year.

Census Bureau director Robert Groves writes that the bill "devastates the nation's statistical information about the status of the economy and the larger society." BusinessWeek chimes in that the end to these surveys "blinds business," noting that businesses rely "heavily on it to do such things as decide where to build new stores, hire new employees, and get valuable insights on consumer spending habits."

Got data news to share?

Feel free to email me.

OSCON 2012 — Join the world's open source pioneers, builders, and innovators July 16-20 in Portland, Oregon. Learn about open development, challenge your assumptions, and fire up your brain.

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Related:

Where the semantic web stumbled, linked data will succeed

Google's Rich Snippets and the Semantic Web

What is Apache Hadoop?

New life for an old census

Slashdot: Most CCTV Systems Come With Trivial Exploits

2012-05-17T13:25:00+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "The use of CCTV cameras for physical surveillance of all kinds of environments has become so pervasive that most of us don't give the devices a second thought anymore. But, those individuals and organizations who actually use and control them should be aware that most of them come with default settings that make them vulnerable to outside attacks. According to Gotham Digital Science researcher Justin Cacak, standalone CCTV video surveillance systems by MicroDigital, HIVISION, CTRing, and many other rebranded devices are not only shipped with remote access enabled by default, but also with preconfigured default accounts and passwords that are banal and easy to guess."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: How To Buy Facebook Stock

2012-05-17T13:00:00+00:00

Facebook goes public tomorrow. It could be worth well over $100 billion dollars. Want to get a piece of that? It's going to be very tricky for mere mortals to get Facebook stock in the IPO. If you want shares, here's what you have to do.

"First, get a ton of money. Like tons. I am talking gazillions."

So says Peter Kupferberg, a principal at Chicago investment counseling firm Gofen and Glossberg. Most of the large online brokerage firms will at least take requests for Facebook shares, but they have rules. Some require existing balances of $500,000. Some will only consider people who already trade 30 times a day. Some even decide whether you're worthy on a case-by-case basis.
"Then open a brokerage account at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, but only open the account if they promise you Facebook stock."

Kupferberg says the deal stock goes first to the preferred customers of the banks underwriting the deal. Then it goes to the people with brokerage accounts who pass all the tests in Step 1. The scarce remainder goes to small investors to whom we wish the best of luck. If you make it that far, don't expect the current estimated share price of $40 to last long. Add scarcity of shares and stratospheric hype, stir, and you'll get what Kupferberg expects to be "a frenzy like we haven't seen in a while that will drive the price up to ridiculous levels."

Basically, if you want Facebook IPO shares, you have to be rich and powerful in order to be taken seriously.

Is Facebook A Good Investment?

"Long, long term, this could turn out to be a very good investment," Kupferberg says. "Do you see people not using it anytime soon?"

Kupferberg says that his firm's model thinks that Facebook is still reasonably valued around $40 per share. But in the very short term, it will be almost impossible for most people to get a piece of Facebook's IPO, and those who do will pay a high price for it. We're not investment counselors at ReadWriteWeb, but if you really want a piece of the Facebook action and didn't buy one on the private market five years ago, it seems like it couldn't hurt to wait a little while for the hype to burn off.

Disclosure: Peter Kupferberg is Jon Mitchell's uncle.

Lead image via Shutterstock

Slashdot: GMU Prof Teaches How To Falsify Wikipedia — and Get Caught

2012-05-17T12:44:00+00:00

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Yoni Appelbaum reports in the Atlantic that as part of their coursework in a class that studies historical hoaxes, undergraduates at George Mason University successfully fooled Wikipedia's community of editors, launching a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of a fictitious 19th-century serial killer named Joe Scafe. The students, enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past, used newspaper databases to identify four actual women murdered in New York City from 1895 to 1897, along with victims of broadly similar crimes, and created Wikipedia articles for the victims, carefully following the rules of the site. But while a similar page created previously by Kelly's students went undetected for years, when students posted the story to Reddit, it took just twenty-six minutes for a redditor to call foul, noting the Wikipedia entries' recent vintage and others were quick to pile on, deconstructing the entire tale. Why did the hoaxes succeed in 2008 on Wikipedia and not in 2012 on Reddit? According to Appelbaum, the answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities. 'Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information, edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating ordinary users from any doubts that might be expressed,' writes Appelbaum. 'Reddit, by contrast, builds its strong community around the centralized exchange of information. Discussion isn't a separate activity but the sine qua non of the site. If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism (PDF).""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Americans Happy To Pay More For Clean Energy, But Only a Little More

2012-05-17T12:03:00+00:00

Fluffeh writes "A recent study of over 1,000 folks for a paper published in Nature Climate Change has found that the average US citizen is inclined to pay a premium to ensure that by 2035, 80% of US power comes from clean energy. At random, respondents received one of three "technological treatments" or definitions of clean energy that included renewable energy sources alone, renewable sources plus natural gas, and renewable sources plus nuclear power. Delving into the socioeconomics, researchers found that Republicans, Independents, and respondents with no party allegiance were less likely by 25, 13 and 25 percentage points respectively to support a NCES than respondents that identified themselves as Democrats."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Can the Go Daddy Girls Convince You They're Serious?

2012-05-17T12:00:00+00:00

Go Daddy wants to be known for more than domain names and racy Superbowl ads. The company has built large businesses around Web hosting and other services for companies of all sizes. But can it really have it both ways?

At a recent meeting in ReadWriteWeb’s San Francisco headquarters, new Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman delighted in reeling off the company’s impressive numbers: almost $1.4 billion in sales, 53 million domains registered, 5 million websites hosted, and so on. Go Daddy is as big as the next eight competitors combined, Adleman said, and gets more than half of all new domain registrations.

But the company, which was bought by private equity firms for $2.25 billion last year has even bigger aspirations. “We don’t want to move away from that,” Adelman said, but “we think we can do more than serve that segment.”

Servers or Celebrities?

“People think we’re a bunch of guys down in Arizona” with domain names and Super Bowls ads, he said, but there are “sections of the site to address the needs of different communities… We have offerings for the tech community, for the developer community.”

Overcoming those perceptions among seasoned techies won’t be easy, though. Questions like “you’re still using Go Daddy?” are often posed to tech start ups. And really, it’s Go Daddy’s own fault.

No matter what its actual technology credentials, the company spent millions of dollars promoting Go Daddy Girls, not cloud infrastructure (4GH Cloud Hosting) or online storage. Even companies that use those services might think twice about explaining why to the CEO. And that’s especially true the larger, and more sophisticated the company. Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman visits RWW HQ.

Adelman acknowledges “some amount of polarization” around the Go Daddy brand, but believes that the company’s scale more than makes up for any negative perceptions. Go Daddy is big enough to enjoy massive economies of scale, and to create a full suite of add-on products for all kinds of customers. Domian names, website hosting and site-building tools, SSL certificates, marketing tools like search engine optimization, search engine marketing, email marketing and social media. “It’s like selling hot dogs at the ballpark,” Adelman said. Sixty six percent of Go Daddy customers have a product in addition to a domain name, he said.

An App Threat?

Why the tech push now? Although Adelman says it kept growing through the recession, the reason for the push could be the gradual move to mobile apps instead of websites, a transition that threatens Go Daddy’s core business. But Adleman says he’s not worried. “The Web will die a slower death than predicted,” he said, adding that given the hype cycle and the rise of HTML5, it might not be long before you start hearing that “the App World is dead.”

TorrentFreak: BitTorrent Piracy Boosts Music Sales, Study Finds

2012-05-17T11:58:49+00:00

For more than a decade researchers have been looking into the effects of music piracy on the revenues of the record industry, with mixed results.

None of these researchers, however, used a large sample of accurate download statistics from a BitTorrent tracker to examine this topic. This missing element motivated economist Robert Hammond, Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, to conduct his own research.

In a paper titled “Profit Leak? Pre-Release File Sharing and the Music Industry” Hammond published his findings.

Between May 2010 and January 2011 the professor collected a variety of download statistics of new albums that were released on the largest private BitTorrent tracker dedicated to music. He then used this data in combination with sales numbers to construct a model that predicts what the causal effect of piracy on music sales is.

The results are unique in its kind and reveal that BitTorrent piracy causes an increase in album sales.

“I isolate the causal effect of file sharing of an album on its sales by exploiting exogenous variation in how widely available the album was prior to its official release date. The findings suggest that file sharing of an album benefits its sales. I don’t find any evidence of a negative effect in any specification, using any instrument,” Hammond concludes in his paper.

In total the sample includes 1,095 albums from 1,075 artists. The research focuses on albums that leaked before their official release. The music industry often states that “curbing pre-release piracy is a particular priority for the recording industry.” These releases are also the focus of criminal proceedings against pirate sites both in the US and the UK.

However, according to the research, sales may actually be hurt by going after these sites. Hammond’s findings suggest that piracy itself acts as a form of advertising similar to radio play and media campaigns, where more downloads result in a moderate increase in sales.

That said, the effect described in the paper is a moderate one. Taking all factors into account Hammond finds that an album that leaks a month in advance results in 59.6 additional sales.

To some degree the results are surprising, as other studies have found a negative relation between music piracy and sales. However, Hammond notes that none of these studies had access to such detailed and precise download statistics which make it possible to go beyond the usual correlation.

Also, unlike several other studies, Hammond’s focuses on album releases instead of single songs.

“I focus on how file sharing of an individual album helps or hurts that album’s sales. The question of interest here is whether an individual artist should expect her sales to decline given wider pre-release availability of the album in file-sharing networks. I find that the answer is no.”

Another unique finding reported in the paper is that popular artists profit more from piracy than less established acts. For smaller artists there is no effect of pre-release piracy on sales. This contradicts older research. Hammond, however, notes that his data is richer than in the other studies, and therefore more accurate.

In addition, we’d argue that the focus on pre-releases may also account for the missing effect on new artists.

While the reported data appears to be solid, the question has to be asked how representative the data set is for all music piracy on BitTorrent. The private tracker in question has more than 150,000 users, who are almost exclusively more than average music fans.

Overall, the paper offers a unique and unprecedented analysis of BitTorrent piracy on music sales. It clearly disputes the music industry argument that pre-release piracy hurts album sales, and suggests that BitTorrent piracy can act as promotion.

Source: BitTorrent Piracy Boosts Music Sales, Study Finds

ReadWriteWeb: Rise of the Tech Bandits: Jason Calacanis, the Shapeshifter

2012-05-17T11:30:00+00:00

Editor's note: In the Summer 2012 issue of SAY Magazine, Dan Frommer's cover story Rise of the Tech Bandits chronicles the history of tech blogging. For the rest of this week, Richard MacManus, who founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003, will be looking back on the early days.

Blog network Weblogs, Inc. sold to AOL in October 2005, for a reported $25 million. I was in San Francisco when it happened, at the Web 2.0 Conference. The morning the deal went public, I remember founder Jason Calacanis arriving at the conference with a smile as wide as the Cheshire Cat himself. He positively glowed, while basking in the congratulations and praise from fellow entrepreneurs at the event. Come to think of it, I've rarely seen Jason Calacanis without a smile on his face. It's usually a mischievous one too, because he likes to be the center of attention.

An excerpt from Dan Frommer's Rise of the Tech Bandits:

"After the crash, the Web 2.0 boom in the mid-2000s gave birth to a new batch of media startups running cheap publishing software and network ads. Free of expenses like copy editors, design staffs or Midtown offices, they told Silicon Valley’s inside story, started breaking big news and quickly caught on.
The most famous, of course, is TechCrunch, the site founded in 2005 by former attorney Mike Arrington and operated for years out of his house in Silicon Valley. (AOL bought TechCrunch in 2010 for more than $25 million.) Mashable also launched in 2005, the creation of 19-year-old Scottish kid Pete Cashmore, now drawing more readers than TechCrunch and, reportedly, with acquisition interest from CNN.[...]
The Web was finally covering itself better than its print counterparts — and independently."

The Weblogs, Inc. sale was the first high profile acquisition of a blogging business, setting the scene for future blog acquisitions like The Huffington Post, Ars Technica, TechCrunch and PaidContent. Calacanis wasn't even a pro blogger. Rather, he was the CEO of a wide-ranging network of blogs that began in September 2003. The most high profile blog under his stewardship was Engadget.

I've met Jason several times over the years and two of those times stand out. Both show aspects of Jason that I believe contributed greatly to his success as an entrepreneur.

The first instance was at a Web 2.0 Conference a few years ago. I don't recall the exact year, but it was during the time Calacanis was running his post-AOL venture Mahalo. I was at an official conference dinner, along with Sean Ammirati (before he became COO of ReadWriteWeb). The table Sean and I were seated at had about 10-12 people. Everyone picked at their starch-heavy plates of food, while engaging in the usual conference chit-chat. Which meant asking or answering these two questions: "And what do you do?", closely followed by "What's been the highlight of the conference for you so far?". This typical, rather placid, conference dinner scene was playing out, when out of nowhere a grinning Jason Calacanis approached the table. He immediately began to regale Sean and I with several funny stories, delivered rapid fire one after the other in his broad Brooklyn accent. It was highly entertaining, but it wasn't a conversation as such... more of a comedy routine. Before either Sean or I had a chance to get a word in, Jason had moved down the table to entertain another group of people. Soon he gravitated to the next table - and all we heard then was appreciative laughter from his new audience.

That's an uncommon skill, to be able to get and hold the attention of multiple groups of people at a social event.

The second story of Jason I have is when he spoke at ReadWriteWeb's 2WAY Summit in New York City, in June last year. Jason had been scheduled to have a debate with his long-standing rival, Gawker CEO Nick Denton. It was a mouth watering prospect, because both men are opinionated and successful media entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, Denton pulled out at the last minute. Jason not only turned up, but turned his one-man interview with our Managing Editor Abraham Hyatt into a highlight of the event. It was entertaining, opinionated and highly quotable ("There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write.").

The Internet industry often takes itself too seriously. It feels good to have someone brighten up your dinner table every now and then.

SAY Media is ReadWriteWeb's parent company.

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: Discussion of imprecise date standards, in web schemas group

2012-05-17T11:17:36+00:00

danbri: Looking for feedback to schema.org on how/what to spec... suggestions welcomed!

(2012-05-17 10:29)

ReadWriteWeb: Disassembling Android: Chinks in Google's Mobile Armor

2012-05-17T11:00:00+00:00

This is Part One of a two-part series on Disassembling Android.

Android conquered the world in 2011. Hundreds of thousands of users activate Google’s mobile operating system every day, a growth rate unprecedented in any era of computing. This extraordinary strength has carried into 2012, but Android is not the brazen warrior it was a year ago, and its vulnerabilities are starting to show. Is the world’s leading smartphone platform ripe for disruption?

Dethroning Android will take more than a rival releasing a new operating system and seeding devices to manufacturers and carriers. Just because Mozilla is developing a browser-based HTML5 operating system (Boot2Gecko) and the Linux community is (finally) trying to make a splash with Tizen (formerly MeeGo), it does not mean that either will push the smiling robot off its perch. Android is too well established to dethrone so simply, and unseating it involves too many moving parts. But Android does show signs of weakness, and it will need a boost in the next couple of years to maintain its lead.

Android, at this moment, is still going strong. According to comScore, it gained 3.7 percentage points of the U.S. market share in the first quarter of 2012, from 47.3% to 51%. That was led by Samsung, which controls 26% of the U.S. smartphone market and gained 0.7 percentage points in the quarter. Apple's market share has been growing faster, as is seen by sales from the top three U.S. mobile carriers, gaining 1.6 percentage points of the market in Q1. Yet the other top Android manufacturers lost share, with LG (-0.7%), Motorola (-0.5%) and HTC (-0.2%) decreasing by a total of 1.4 percentage points.

Many observers thought that Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) would provide the boost that Android needs. The update was designed to quell many of the problems that manufacturers, carriers and developers had with the operating system. Its promise is still attractive – streamlined app design, easier to code for multiple screen sizes – but the update has not put an end to fragmentation (still Android’s biggest challenge), nor has it seen widespread adoption.

As of the beginning of May, Android 4.0 is being used by 4.9% of users accessing Google Play. Gingerbread (Android 2.3x) is still the predominant flavor of the OS at 64.4% and stubborn Froyo (Android 2.2x) still controls more than one out of every five devices (20.9%). Why hasn't Ice Cream Sandwich seen mass adoption six months after its unveiling? Foremost, carriers and manufacturers are not updating older phones from Gingerbread through over-the-air updates in a timely manner. Second, the manufacturers have been slow to put out devices that take advantage of the update's new capabilities.

Only a handful of desirable Ice Cream Sandwich devices are available right now. The newly released HTC One series is probably the best, but that may not last long with a new Samsung flagship (Galaxy S III) in the pipeline. AT&T did not have an Ice Cream Sandwich device on its shelves in any form until the Samsung Galaxy Note was released. Verizon was not much better, with the Android flagship Galaxy Nexus as the only decent Ice Cream Sandwich phone on the market (from any carrier) for a good portion of 2012. Simply put, for most of the year, there have not been a lot of exciting high-end Android phones. It's hard to see how the latest version of Android can achieve mass adoption while it's so hard to obtain.

Android still does robust sales at lower price points both in the U.S. and abroad. Going forward, that will continue to be a strength, as manufacturers release cheaper devices. Lower-end Android phones will battle for supremacy in emerging markets as Asian manufacturers such as ZTE, Huawei and Samsung pump out more and more inexpensive devices.

So what might actually pierce that Android armor? Look out for Part Two of our miniseries.

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: Four short links: 17 May 2012

Nat Torkington — 2012-05-17T10:00:00+00:00

The Mythology of Big Data (PDF) -- slides from a Strata keynote by Mark R. Madsen. A lovely explanation of the social impediments to the rational use of data. (via Hamish MacEwan)
Scamworld -- amazing deconstruction of the online "get rich quick" scam business. (via Andy Baio)
Ceres: Solving Complex Problems with Computing Muscle -- Johnny Lee Chung explains the (computer vision) uses of the open source Ceres Non-Linear Least Squares Solver library from Google.
How to Start a Think Tank (Guardian) -- The answer to the looming crisis of legitimacy we're facing is greater openness - not just regarding who met who at what Christmas party, but on the substance of policy. The best way to re-engage people in politics is to change how politics works - in the case of our project, to develop a more direct way for the people who use and provide public and voluntary services to create better social policy. Hear, hear. People seize on the little stuff because you haven't given them a way to focus something big with you.

Slashdot: NASA Counts 4,700 Potentially Hazardous Near-Earth Asteroids

2012-05-17T09:25:00+00:00

coondoggie writes "NASA continues to get a better handle on the asteroids buzzing around in space saying today that there are roughly 4,700 potentially hazardous asteroids, or as NASA calls them PHAs. NASA says these PHAs are a subset of a larger group of near-Earth asteroids but have the closest orbits to Earth's – passing within five million miles (or about eight million kilometers) and are big enough to survive passing through Earth's atmosphere and cause damage on a regional, or greater, scale."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: JavaScript and Dart: Can we do better?

Simon St. Laurent — 2012-05-17T08:00:00+00:00

JavaScript keeps advancing by leaps and bounds, but is it powerful enough yet? Is the Web ready to take on all the challenges we throw at it?

I talked with Seth Ladd, a web engineer and Chrome Developer Advocate at Google who's working on Dart, but still, I'm happy to say, interested in JavaScript itself. He's been working with larger projects and larger teams figuring out how to build bigger, faster, and more complex applications than most of us care to dream about.

Seth's constant push - "we can do better" - takes a hard look at where we are today with web programming, acknowledging decades of improvement but looking hard for the next best thing.

Highlights from the full video interview include:

Speed - is JavaScript fast enough yet? [Discussed at the 2:12 mark]

60 frames per second - can the browser look that smooth? [Discussed at the 3:21 mark]

Dart - Structure, tooling, and reaching both JavaScript and C++ programmers [Discussed at the 6:27 mark]

"Dart compiles to modern JavaScript today" [Discussed at the 9:16 mark]

"JavaScript is becoming the bytecode of the Web" - many languages compile to JavaScript [Discussed at the 11:16 mark]

View Source isn't what it used to be - is Github the answer? [Discussed at the 12:07 mark]

You can view the entire conversation in the following video:

Fluent Conference: JavaScript & Beyond — Explore the changing worlds of JavaScript & HTML5 at the O'Reilly Fluent Conference (May 29 - 31 in San Francisco, Calif.).

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Related:

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from klamma] MOLE

2012-05-17T07:54:01+00:00

Slashdot: World's Subways Share Common Mathematical Structure

2012-05-17T07:02:00+00:00

Hugh Pickens writes "No two subway systems have the same design. New York City's haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organized Moscow Metro, or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo's subway network. Now BBC reports that a study analyzing 14 subway networks around the world has discovered that the distribution of stations within each of the subway networks, as well as common proportions of the numbers of lines, stations, and total distances seem to converge over time to a similar structure regardless of where the networks were, when they were begun, or how quickly they reached their current layout. 'Although these (networks) might appear to be planned in some centralized manner, it is our contention here that subway systems like many other features of city systems evolve and self-organize themselves as the product of a stream of rational but usually uncoordinated decisions taking place through time,' write the study authors. The researchers uncovered three simple features that make subway system topologies similar all around the world. First, subway networks can be divided into a core and branches, like a spider with many legs. The 'core' typically sits beneath the city's center, and its stations usually form a ring shape. Second, the branches tend to be about twice as long as the width of the core. The wider the core, the longer the branches. Last, an average of 20 percent of the stations in the core link two or more subway lines, allowing people to make transfers. 'The apparent convergence towards a unique network shape in the temporal limit suggests the existence of dominant, universal mechanisms governing the evolution of these structures.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: UK Police Roll Out On-the-Spot Mobile Data Extraction System

2012-05-17T04:34:00+00:00

Qedward writes "The Metropolitan Police has rolled out a mobile device data extraction system to allow officers to extract data 'within minutes' from suspects' phones while they are in custody. 'Ostensibly, the system has been deployed to target phones that are suspected of having actually been used in criminal activity, although data privacy campaigners may focus on potentially wider use.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Planet RDF: Google Knowledge Graph: things, not string

2012-05-17T03:54:45+00:00

Google announced its “knowledge graph” today and describes it as “an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a ‘graph’ — that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings. … It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.” Information from the knowledge graph will initially augment search results — the feature is already being rolled out to US English users. A short video explains more.

A CNET article quotes KG project manager Jack Menzel: Menzel pitches Knowledge Graph without using the word “semantic” even once. While he says, “I dream of the semantic Web,” he takes pains to point out that what Google is announcing today is not what people talk about when they discuss semantic Web concepts. “We do continue to work on how to make search semantic,” he says, “but talking about it brings out the crazy people.” I hope this did not come out the way he intended it to.

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tomkeays] The Divine Proportion and Web Design | Codrops

2012-05-17T03:33:52+00:00

The divine proportion goes by a handful of names that all refer to the same rectangular shape. Golden rectangle, golden ratio, mean ratio and Phi all refer to the shape that is considered the most pleasing and harmonious to the eye. The golden rectangle is defined by a shape that has a proportion of 1.618; this is sometimes referred to as the magic number. Although the mathematical equation is quite precise, the use of this theory for design is not. Many opt to round numbers to two decimals and whole numbers to make creating the formula less complex. But the golden rectangle is used for more than just an overall aesthetic. The shape can be found in navigation bars, the shapes of photographs and in the grouping of parts on a page. Because the shape is so common, many designers create golden rectangles throughout their work without even knowing it.

Slashdot: India's Proposal For Government Control of Internet To Be Discussed In Geneva

2012-05-17T02:07:00+00:00

First time accepted submitter cvenky writes "The Indian Government is proposing to create an intergovernmental body 'to develop internet policies, oversee all internet standards bodies and policy organizations, negotiate internet-related treaties and sit in judgment when internet-related disputes come up.' This committee will be funded and staffed by the UN and will report to the UN General Assembly which effectively means the control of the internet passes on to World Governments directly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: Indirect reciprocity with trinary reputations. (arXiv:1205.3547v1 [physics.soc-ph])

2012-05-17T01:18:54+00:00

Indirect reciprocity is a reputation-based mechanism for cooperation in social dilemma situations when individuals do not repeatedly meet. The conditions under which cooperation based on indirect reciprocity occurs has been examined in great details. Previous theoretical analysis assumed for mathematical tractability that an individual possesses a binary reputation value, i.e., good or bad, which depends on their past actions and other factors. However, in real situations, reputations of individuals may be multiple valued. Another puzzling discrepancy between the theory and experiments is the status of the so-called image scoring, in which cooperation and defection are judged to be good and bad, respectively, independent of other factors. Such an assessment rule is found in behavioral experiments, whereas it is known to be unstable in theory. In the present study, we fill both gaps by theoretical analysis of a trinary reputation model. By an exhaustive search, we identify all the cooperative and stable equilibria composed of a homogeneous population or a heterogeneous population containing two types of players. Some results derived for the trinary reputation model are direct extensions of those for the binary model. However, we find that, the trinary model allows cooperation under image scoring without special conditions.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: Uncertainties and Ambiguities in Percentiles and how to Avoid Them. (arXiv:1205.3588v1 [stat.OT])

2012-05-17T01:18:54+00:00

The recently proposed fractional scoring scheme is used to attribute publications to percentile rank classes. It is shown that in this way uncertainties and ambiguities in the evaluation of percentile ranks do not occur. Using the fractional scoring the total score of all papers exactly reproduces the theoretical value.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: Alignment and integration of complex networks by hypergraph-based spectral clustering. (arXiv:1205.3630v1 [physics.soc-ph])

2012-05-17T01:18:54+00:00

Complex networks possess a rich, multi-scale structure reflecting the dynamical and functional organization of the systems they model. Often there is a need to analyze multiple networks simultaneously, to model a system by more than one type of interaction or to go beyond simple pairwise interactions, but currently there is a lack of theoretical and computational methods to address such problems. Here we introduce a framework for multi-network analysis based on hypergraph representations. Our main result is a generalization of the Perron-Frobenius theorem from which we derive spectral clustering algorithms for directed and undirected hypergraphs. We illustrate our approach with applications for tripartite community detection in folksonomies, for local and global alignment of protein-protein interaction networks between multiple species and for detecting clusters of overlapping regulatory pathways in directed networks.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: Capacitated Team Formation Problem on Social Networks. (arXiv:1205.3643v1 [cs.SI])

2012-05-17T01:18:54+00:00

In a team formation problem, one is required to find a group of users that can match the requirements of a collaborative task. Example of such collaborative tasks abound, ranging from software product development to various participatory sensing tasks in knowledge creation. Due to the nature of the task, team members are often required to work on a co-operative basis. Previous studies have indicated that co-operation becomes effective in presence of social connections. Therefore, effective team selection requires the team members to be socially close as well as a division of the task among team members so that no user is overloaded by the assignment. In this work, we investigate how such teams can be formed on a social network.

Since our team formation problems are proven to be NP-hard, we design efficient approximate algorithms for finding near optimum teams with provable guarantees. As traditional data-sets from on-line social networks (e.g. Twitter, Facebook etc) typically do not contain instances of large scale collaboration, we have crawled millions of software repositories spanning a period of four years and hundreds of thousands of developers from GitHub, a popular open-source social coding network. We perform large scale experiments on this data-set to evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of our algorithms. Experimental results suggest that our algorithms achieve significant improvement in finding effective teams, as compared to naive strategies and scale well with the size of the data. Finally, we provide a validation of our techniques by comparing with existing software teams in GitHub.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: A k-shell decomposition method for weighted networks. (arXiv:1205.3720v1 [physics.soc-ph])

2012-05-17T01:18:54+00:00

We present a generalized method for calculating the k-shell structure of weighted networks. The method takes into account both the weight and the degree of a network, in such a way that in the absence of weights we resume the shell structure obtained by the classic k-shell decomposition. In the presence of weights we show that the method is able to partition the network in a more refined way, without the need of any arbitrary threshold on the weight values. Furthermore, by simulating spreading processes using the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered model in four different real weighted networks, we show that the weighted k-shell decomposition method ranks the nodes more accurately, by placing nodes with higher spreading potential into shells closer to the core. In addition we demonstrate our new method on a real economic network and show that the core calculated using the weighted k-shell method is more meaningful from an economics perspective when compared to the unweighted method.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: A long-time limit of world subway networks. (arXiv:1105.5294v3 [physics.soc-ph] UPDATED)

2012-05-17T01:18:54+00:00

We study the temporal evolution of the structure of the world's largest subway networks in an exploratory manner. We show that, remarkably, all these networks converge to {a shape which shares similar generic features} despite their geographic and economic differences. This limiting shape is made of a core with branches radiating from it. For most of these networks, the average degree of a node (station) within the core has a value of order 2.5 and the proportion of k=2 nodes in the core is larger than 60%. The number of branches scales roughly as the square root of the number of stations, the current proportion of branches represents about half of the total number of stations, and the average diameter of branches is about twice the average radial extension of the core. Spatial measures such as the number of stations at a given distance to the barycenter display a first regime which grows as r^2 followed by another regime with different exponents, and eventually saturates. These results -- difficult to interpret in the framework of fractal geometry -- confirm and yield a natural explanation in the geometric picture of this core and their branches: the first regime corresponds to a uniform core, while the second regime is controlled by the interstation spacing on branches. The apparent convergence towards a unique network shape in the temporal limit suggests the existence of dominant, universal mechanisms governing the evolution of these structures.

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-turtle/index.html#

2012-05-17T00:17:31+00:00

http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-turtle/index.html#

Slashdot: Ask Slashdot: Holding ISPs Accountable For Contracted DSL Bandwidth

2012-05-17T00:17:00+00:00

mcleland writes "I'm not getting the bandwidth I paid for from my DSL connection. My '3mbps' fluctuates between about 2.7 during the day down to 0.1 or 0.2 in the evening according to speedtest.net. Let's assume DSL is the only viable option for broadband at my house and I can't really move right now (rural area, on north face of the mountain, no cable service, very poor cell coverage). This was discussed 6 years ago, but I'd like to see if there are any current thoughts on whether I'm just stuck or if there is some way to make the ISP hold up its end."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Superflares Found On Sun-Like Stars

2012-05-16T23:55:00+00:00

astroengine writes "Scientists have found superflares more than 1 million times more powerful than flares generated by the sun occurring on sun-like stars being studied by NASA's Kepler space telescope. The finding, culled from 120 days of observations of 83,000 stars, is the first to detail how often and how energetic flares on other stars can be. The discovery, however, raises a question about how the massive outbursts, believed to be caused by complex magnetic interactions, can physically occur."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Wil Wheaton: BitTorrent Isn't Only For Piracy

2012-05-16T23:35:00+00:00

itwbennett writes "Geek advocate Wil Wheaton has written a blog post on the (legal) usefulness of BitTorrent, saying that the speed of his recent download of Ubuntu 12.04 should serve as a reminder that BitTorrent fills an important niche. Wheaton compares blocking BitTorrent to closing freeways because bank robbers could get away."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Broadcast Industry Wades In On Dish Network's Hopper

2012-05-16T22:53:00+00:00

gollum123 writes "As with past technological threats, network executives are closing ranks against a Dish Network device that undermines the broadcast business model. The disruptive technology at hand is an ad-eraser, embedded in new digital video recorders sold by Charles W. Ergen's Dish Network, one of the nation's top distributors of TV programming. Turn it on, and all the ads recorded on most prime-time network shows are automatically skipped, no channel-flipping or fast-forwarding necessary. Some reviewers have already called the feature, called the Auto Hop, a dream come true for consumers. But for broadcasters and advertisers, it is an attack on an entrenched television business model, and it must be strangled, lest it spread elsewhere."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Canada's Internet Surveillance Bill: Not Dead After All

2012-05-16T22:10:00+00:00

First time accepted submitter Maow writes "Despite a recent story claiming that Canada's Bill C-30, covering internet surveillance, has died a 'lonely' death, the minister responsible claims otherwise. 'Public Safety Minister Vic Toews is denying reports that the Harper government intends to quietly shelve its controversial online surveillance bill, C-30.' Speaking to reporters on Wednesday morning, Toews insisted the legislation was moving ahead. He has previously stated this is the bill that you either support, 'or you stand with the child pornographers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: FDA Panel Backs First Rapid, Take Home HIV Test

2012-05-16T21:50:00+00:00

TheGift73 writes in with news about an over-the-counter HIV test getting the backing of a panel of FDA experts. "American consumers may soon be able to test themselves for the virus that causes AIDS in the privacy of their own homes, after a panel of experts on Tuesday recommended approval of the first rapid, over-the-counter HIV test. The 17 members of the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted unanimously that the benefits of the OraQuick HIV test outweigh its potential risks for consumers. While the test, which uses a mouth swab to return a result in 20 minutes, does not appear to be as accurate as professionally-administered diagnostics, panelists said it could provide an important way to expand HIV testing. The FDA will make its final decision on whether to approve the product later this year, weighing the opinion of the panel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Rise of the Tech Bandits: Michael Arrington, the Early Years

2012-05-16T21:25:00+00:00

TechCrunch launched on June 11, 2005, with the aim of covering the emerging trend called Web 2.0. Just a few days after, I was in an email exchange with cofounders Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. It turned out that both Mike and Keith were regular readers of my blog, ReadWriteWeb. Straight away I knew Mike and I had a lot in common, in terms of our motivations for blogging and our propensity to tinker with the latest online developments. Mike's explanation, in that first week of TechCrunch, of why he and Keith started the blog resonated with me: "The idea came about because my VC friends kept asking me what this or that company was all about, and how it fit into the bigger Web 2.0 picture. And since I am trying everything out anyway, why not write about it."

An excerpt from Dan Frommer's Rise of the Tech Bandits:

The dot-com boom was still a decade away, but “Time was discovering computers gung-ho,” says Elmer-DeWitt, a long-time technology and science editor and writer at Time, who now writes a business-focused blog about Apple for Fortune, another Time Inc. title.

The challenge Time had in covering technology, Elmer-DeWitt says, was that “it was run by a bunch of old fuddy-duddies who didn’t use computers. And they didn’t really know what they wanted. At one point, Walter Isaacson [the former Time editor who recently wrote Steve Jobs’ biography] made me write a story about ‘cyberpunk.’ He had no idea what that meant, but he loved the word and he wanted it on the cover of Time, so I had to scratch together a story. I’m totally embarrassed by it.”

If anything makes me wistful about those early days of Web 2.0 blogging, it's that trying things out has gone out of fashion now. In 2012 it's either a race to get to the news first, or a crapshoot for social media referrals on a story 100 other bloggers are also writing. Who has time to try stuff out when you are live blogging an Apple earnings call, speculating on when Yahoo's lying CEO will step down, or wondering what Facebook's share price will be?

But back to 2005. Later that year, Mike invited me to stay at his newly rented ranch in Atherton while I attended the second annual Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I wouldn't say it was the start of a beautiful friendship, since we rarely speak to each other these days. But it gave me an insight into what made Mike Arrington the defining media figure of the Web 2.0 era.

One of Mike's attributes that isn't acknowledged enough is his generosity. I've seen evidence of this many times, including that initial invitation to stay at his house in Silicon Valley in 2005. He went on to extend the same invitation to many other developers, bloggers and entrepreneurs - leading to the now-legendary parties held on his back lawn in the Web 2.0 era.

In those early days, before the Web 2.0 hype kicked in toward the end of 2006, Mike and I continued to swap blogging tips and stories. That is another thing I miss about that era of blogging: the camaraderie and willingness to share. You could say we were eating the Social Web dog food, by actually being social.

Mike Arrington has become famous for his outspoken nature and ability to disrupt the status quo of journalism. Regardless of the controversy he tends to attract, I've always admired his analytical prowess. He's a great blogger not because he stirs shit. He's been highly successful because he did - and still does on his new indie blog, Uncrunched - what he set out to do in 2005. He tries things out and then writes it up in a compelling manner.

SAY Media is ReadWriteWeb's parent company.

Slashdot: Verizon To Kill All Unlimited Data Plans

2012-05-16T21:25:00+00:00

afabbro writes "Verizon mentioned in an investor conference that it will be eliminating unlimited data plans, even for those it grandfathered in. From the article: 'Speaking at the J.P Morgan Technology Media and Telecom conference today, Verizon Communications CFO Fran Shammo told investors that the company's 3G unlimited data plans that customers were allowed to hang onto last year when Verizon switched to a tiered offering will soon go away entirely. Instead, the company will migrate its existing and new 4G LTE customers to a new "data share plan." The company has yet to announce the details of this new plan, but it has said previously that the data share plan will be introduced in midsummer. The plan will allow people on the same family plan to share buckets of data each month, much like they share voice minutes and text messaging. It will also allow individuals to share data across different 4G LTE devices. '"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TorrentFreak: IMAGiNE Member Pleads Guilty to Criminal Copyright Infringement

2012-05-16T21:19:52+00:00

Last September, IMAGiNE, one of the Internet’s leading BitTorrent release groups, stopped distributing new films. This immediately sparked speculation that the authorities were onto them, and last month the confirmation came that this was indeed the case.

Three weeks ago four members of the group were arrested and charged with several counts of criminal copyright infringement. Aside from reproducing and releasing copyrighted films on their private tracker UnleashTheNet, they also “capped” films at local movie theaters.

One of the accused members, 27-year old Sean Lovelady from California, admitted several of these acts and pleads guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Lovelady also waived his rights to appeal and in exchange the authorities have promised not to prosecute him for the other charges listed in the indictment.

With his guilty plea Lovelady faces a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison, a $250,000 fine, plus damages that might be claimed by copyright holders.

In the plea agreement Lovelady further agrees to “cooperate fully and truthfully with the United States, and provide all information known to the defendant regarding any criminal activity as requested by the government.” This might affect the cases against the other IMAGiNE members who have not pleaded guilty according to the arraignment sheets.

In addition to the guilty plea, an overview of “facts” which Lovelady signed as true and accurate gives an overview of some of the copyright infringements that took place, that UnleashTheNet was operated by IMAGiNE, and that the group also sold releases.

In furtherance of the conspiracy and to provide a platform for IMAGiNE Group members to share and to ready copies of motion pictures and other copyrighted works for dissemination over the Internet, in July and August 2010 a conspirator in the Eastern District of Virginia took a series of steps to facilitate the use of a new website for the IMAGiNE Group, titled “unleashthe.net.” In the Eastern District of Virginia and elsewhere, this conspirator: (a) rented computer servers in France and elsewhere for use by the IMAGiNE Group and to host its website; (b) registered domain names for use b the IMAGiNE Group; and (c) opened email and PayPal accounts to receive donations and payments from persons downloading or buying IMAGiNE Group releases of infringing or “pirated” copies of motion pictures and other copyrighted works and to fund payments for computer servers.

The same document also reveals that the MPAA was the main motivator behind the investigation.

“Following contact from a representative of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in March 2010, investigators with the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement(Homeland Security Investigations or HSI Norfolk) began investigating an Internet release group, identified as the IMAGiNE Group,” the document reads.

This is identical to the case against Megaupload, where the MPAA was also the driving force. And there are more similarities. Both cases are being handled by US Attorney Neil MacBride, who was also on the NinjaVideo case. Considering MacBride’s past work as Vice President of Anti-Piracy for the lobby group BSA, he is probably well-connected with the MPAA.

Thus far MacBride and his team have booked some successes in the NinjaVideo case. Five people connected to the site were arrested last year and four received jail sentences.

Lovelady and the others have been released from custody and await their sentencing, which is scheduled for this fall.

Source: IMAGiNE Member Pleads Guilty to Criminal Copyright Infringement

MusicBrainz Blog: Search server release: 2012-05-15

2012-05-16T21:10:50+00:00

In case you haven’t gotten enough of release announcements, we have another one for you. Yesterday during the main releases we also released a new search server to match the main server release. Thanks much to Paul Taylor for working on this release to be timed perfectly!

Bug

[SEARCH-198] – The artist is getting a lowered score on MBS
[SEARCH-199] – Search includes empty annotations
[SEARCH-200] – Search on release giving to much boost to matches on CatalogNo
[SEARCH-201] – explain option doesnt work if search results contain non ISO-8859-1 characters
[SEARCH-216] – Null pointer exception when building freedb

Improvement

[SEARCH-157] – Be able to search for a track by its metadata OR its puid
[SEARCH-186] – Search Server has hard coded redirect URL
[SEARCH-187] – Update Junit Test from 3 to 4
[SEARCH-202] – Allow searching for RGs based on their releases’ status
[SEARCH-204] – Upgrade codebase to Lucene 3.6
[SEARCH-214] – Add release group ID to the web service indexed search results for recordings

New Feature

[SEARCH-205] – Search server should return multiple ISWCs for works
[SEARCH-207] – Changes due to introduction of ISO-3 language code
[SEARCH-208] – Chnages due to Split release group attributes into two types Schema Change
[SEARCH-209] – Support for Multiple IPI Artists
[SEARCH-211] – Support for new Track ‘Number’ field in a track
[SEARCH-212] – Add abiility to index, display and search works by lyrics language as part of schema change
[SEARCH-213] – Changes due to MBS-1385:Support unknown end dates

Task

[SEARCH-192] – Update Maven 2 to Maven 3

Slashdot: Book Review: The Logic of Chance

2012-05-16T20:42:00+00:00

eldavojohn writes "The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution is a comprehensive snapshot of the latest research of biological evolution. The text is written by Eugene V. Koonin, an editor for a journal and researcher at NCBI. The book, although lacking in foundational knowledge and often foregoing explanation of research, presents a comprehensive and well-referenced view of modern evolutionary research. It is heavily laden with acronyms and jargon specific to biology and evolution. As a result, reading it requires either prior knowledge or a high tolerance for looking up these advanced topics with the reward of it being an extremely eye opening and enjoyable read worthy of your time." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MusicBrainz Blog: Announcing libmusicbrainz releases 4.0.3 and 5.0.1

2012-05-16T20:30:34+00:00

Regrettably, a couple of errors were found close to the release of v4.0.2 and v5.0.0. I have just released v4.0.3 and v5.0.1 with the following changes:

– Fix LMB-32 – Correctly ignore unrecognised nodes
– Don’t compile using -Werror when building from tarball

The releases are available:

libmusicbrainz-4.0.3.tar.gz
(MD5 checksum: 19b43a543d338751e9dc524f6236892b)

libmusicbrainz-5.0.1.tar.gz
(MD5 checksum: a0406b94c341c2b52ec0fe98f57cadf3)

Documentation for the new version is available under

http://metabrainz.github.com/libmusicbrainz/

Apologies to all for the need to make this release so soon after the last one.

Andy

Last.fm – the Blog: Musings from The Great Escape

Steve Whilton — 2012-05-16T20:26:21+00:00

Last week I attended The Great Escape which is a fantastic festival and conference in Brighton. In a previous life I built the Great Escape website for the Mama group and I’ve been to the festival for the last two years. I love it.

If you have never been to TGE, then I’d highly recommend you check it out next year. Spread out over 30 venues it is a great place to listen to new and upcoming bands as well as some more established artists. The vibe of the festival is chilled and when the sun shines, there’s no better place to be than Brighton.

On Friday morning I attended a conference about New Music Radio and listened intently about how curated radio is changing with an interesting panel of podcasters, radio entrepreneurs and DJs, one of which kindly let me crash at his family’s house (thanks Darren!) for the duration my stay.

When the debate was opened up for questions from the audience Duncan Geere from Wired asked how the panel see services like Last.fm. The response from Matt Young who runs Song By Toad was interesting and although I know he has a vested interest as a ‘radio presenter’, what he said was simply not correct. And I quote:
“I really think Last.fm and Pandora are fucking pointless. Whenever I log in to Last.fm, it just plays me 20 songs I already know. There’s no way to listen to anything new”.

Well Mr Young.. have you not checked out your personalised recommendations? Have you missed the new release recommendations, have you checked out Discover? Ever tried Your Recommended radio? browsed music by tag or tried multi-tag radio? There are SO many ways to find new music via Last.fm that the potential to discover tracks and artists you like but haven’t yet listened to is enormous. Better yet, we can offer a choice to account for the needs of the people you seem to have overlooked… people who WANT to listen to music they know and like.

The point was well made by Mr Trick – which thankfully added a reality check to the statements from others on that panel – and that is… not everyone has a desire to have a DJ ‘throw them a curve-ball’. They actually want to listen to, and be recommended, music that we know they will like.

The fact that new, upcoming and independent artists have uploaded almost 4 million of their tracks to be discovered in and amongst the entire catalogue of almost 15 million streamable tracks and the fact that our Last.fm users have scrobbled and added rich data for more than 50 million artists should tell you that the scope to discover new music with Last.fm is huge.

It is interesting to note that the poll running on Wired’s site currently shows that 70% of people (at time of writing) are listening to less traditional radio because of Last.fm.

So, Matt Young, please come on over to Last.fm anytime and join us for a techmosis session, perhaps one Friday. We’d love to show you how good Last.fm really is and why millions of people all around the world know for a fact that what we are doing here is far from “fucking pointless”.

Slashdot: Star City and the Baikonur Cosmodrome

2012-05-16T20:20:00+00:00

First time accepted submitter zyborg writes "Here's 44 photographs of the Baikonour Cosmodrome used by the ISS program. The pictures range from training, launch vehicle transport and assembly, launch, touchdown, pictures from space, etc. From the article 'Earlier today, a Soyuz-FG rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying an International Space Station (ISS) crew into orbit. Baikonur, Russia's primary space launch facility since the 1950s, is the largest in the world, and supports multiple launches of both manned and unmanned rockets every year. With the U.S. manned space program currently on hold, Baikonur is now the sole launching point for trips to the ISS. Gathered here is a look at the facility, some of the cosmonaut training programs in Star City outside of Moscow, and a few recent launches and landings — plus a bonus: 3 spectacular long-exposure images of Earth from the ISS.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Facebook Adds 96 Million Shares, Will Privacy Get Worse After IPO?

2012-05-16T20:00:00+00:00

AlistairCharlton writes "Facebook has made yet another amendment to its S-1 filing, adding a further 96 million shares, pushing its initial public offering up to a potential maximum of $18.4bn (£11.5bn). In what is the eighth amendment to its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook has also increased the number of shares allowed for over allotment, up from 50.6 million to 63.2 million." Facebook will have a lot of pressure to increase revenue after it goes public. jfruh writes in with a story about how that will impact their privacy policies. "There's been a steady drumbeat of panics over the past few years involving how Facebook uses the personal information you give it; nevertheless, someday you'll look back at 2012 as the golden age of Facebook privacy. That's because, once Facebook has its IPO, it'll come under huge pressure from the markets to extract more revenue from its business. And with display advertising not generating game-changing amounts of money, Facebook has only one valuable resource: your data, which is going to be monetized as hard as possible."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Japanese Researchers Transmit 3Gbps Using Terahertz Frequencies

2012-05-16T19:15:00+00:00

MrSeb writes "Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a new wireless transmission system that works above all currently regulated spectrum frequencies. The new system works at the range of 300GHz to 3THz (terahertz), which is the Far Infrared (FIR) frequencies of the infrared spectrum. That spectrum is currently totally unregulated by any country or standards organization in the world, making it ripe for development of new technologies. So far the Japanese researchers have transmitted data at 3Gbps, but in theory speeds of up to 100Gbps should be possible."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Startup Swingers: Swapping Founders to Generate Fresh Ideas

2012-05-16T19:00:00+00:00

Remember "swinging"? Two people in a committed relationship go to a party with a bunch of other people in committed relationships. They all separate, find new partners for the evening and get jiggy. It may sound lurid and gross, but it’s the cool new thing for startup founders.

Swapping Ideas, Not Spouses

First, let’s be clear. We’re not talking about sex. We’re talking about Founder Swap, a June 1 event in New York where teams from six different startups will get together, trade partners for a day and go home with an injection of fresh ideas. The tagline? “Like Wife Swap but for Founders. We want to get startups pregnant with new ideas.”

“Young teams who are working redline as hard as they can with just one or two other people, a little bit of fatigue can set in and you can get overfocused,” explains Jonathan Basker, VP of human resources at Betaworks and one of three people behind Founder Swap, along with Scroll Kit founders Kate Ray and Cody Brown. “Our goal is to disrupt that sequence and see what happens.”

Here’s what he hopes happens. Founders will soak up some objective perspective on their product and perhaps a little constructive criticism. And they’ll pick up practical advice - technical founders will glean tips from business-oriented founders and vice versa.

No Breakups Allowed

Here’s what he hopes doesn’t happen. Founders meet new people and fire their current partners. “That would be a horrifying result,” Basker says. “The idea is not to reformulate your team but to inform yourself about how you’re working. We’re not trying to be home wreckers here.”

The inaugural event will focus on software companies, to ensure participants have something in common. All six startups must have at least a product idea. Ideally, each team will consist of two or three people and will be pre-series-A, so no parental guidance from meddlesome VCs.

Founder Swap will decide who pairs off with whom. Couples will meet Thursday and spend Friday together. There will be no filming (though it’s easy to imagine how this might someday evolve into a reality show on Bravo).

“I would be ecstatic," Basker says, "if at the end of this, each team gets back together and says, ‘Wow, this was really cool,’ and feels energized by the event, if each one of these companies walks away with a new perspective or just one kernel of useful information they didn’t have before.”

Slashdot: LinuxMint13 RC Is Available For Testing

2012-05-16T18:53:00+00:00

donadony writes "LinuxMint13 RC is available for testing, this release comes with 2 versions in a separated dvd`s: Mate and Cinnamon. LinuxMint13 Cinnamon is very light and offers some customization, integration of new applets, extensions and themes that can be found on the official website."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Apple Tells Siri To Stop Recommending Nokia

2012-05-16T18:33:00+00:00

judgecorp writes "Apple has changed the answer Siri gives to the question 'what is the best smartphone ever?' to prevent the voice-driven assistant from promoting the Nokia Lumia 900. Originally Siri trawled online reviews on the web using the wolfram Alpha search engine, to come up with the Lumia, much to Apple's embarrassment. Now, apple has intervened, replacing that answer with a joke: 'Wait there are other phones?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Kevin Bacon Meets Wikipedia With New Pathfinding Program

2012-05-16T17:51:00+00:00

New submitter BLT2112 writes "Inspired by the Oracle of Bacon, the Oracle of Wikipedia finds the shortest path between two Wikipedia articles, as in Wikipedia Golf. As explained in the site, 'One selects one article as the tee and another article as the hole and then completes the course between them clicking as few links as possible. No typing is allowed. . . . The Oracle also allows you to search for the most challenging potential Wikipedia Golf courses. Can you find a longer course and merit a place in the "records" section?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: The Pirate Bay Suffering Global Outage From Massive DDoS Attack

2012-05-16T17:10:00+00:00

MoldySpore writes "If anyone has tried to get to The Pirate Bay in the last 24 hours, they have most likely been met with a timeout. As an article on TorrentFreak notes, only a week ago The Pirate Bay scolded Anonymous for its attack on ISP Virgin Media, and now the site is currently the victim of a DDoS attack that is effectively keeping people from viewing the site. There is a lot of speculation as to whether this is retaliation from Anonymous, the work of an agency such as the RIAA and their associates, or an anti-pirate company such as PiratePay." Cyberwarfare? Pimple-faced teenagers? Someone screwed up the routing tables?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Google Goes Back to What It Does Well: Finding Things

2012-05-16T17:00:00+00:00

Surprise! Google has completely transformed the way search works again. But this time, it's a kind of search that would have made the old Google proud. Today, starting with U.S., English-language users, Google unveils the Knowledge Graph. Search now looks at the words of your query and identifies the things in it. You're not just searching the Web anymore. You're searching the world.

From Words to Things

Most of Google users' queries are ambiguous. In the old Google, when you searched for "kings," Google didn't know whether you meant actual monarchs, the hockey team, the basketball team or the TV series, so it did its best to show you Web results for all of them.

In the new Google, with the Knowledge Graph online, a new box will come up. You'll still get the Google results you're used to, including the box scores for the team Google thinks you're looking for, but on the right side, a box called "See results about" will show brief descriptions for the Los Angeles Kings, the Sacramento Kings, and the TV series, Kings. If you need to clarify, click the one you're looking for, and Google will refine your search query for you.

When Google knows which thing you're asking about, this box becomes a resource in itself. It will fill in a brief description, likely culled from Wikipedia, and it will list a few key facts specific to the thing in question.

For example, it will show you when a person was born, when they died, where they went to college and so forth. But if you search for a roller coaster, it might tell you how many Gs you'll feel, what its longest drop is and who designed it. If it's a band, you'll see upcoming shows and the latest album releases. Oftentimes, all the information you need will be present right on the search page.

The box also shows related concepts underneath. So if you searched for Frank Lloyd Wright, you'll see links to his projects, too, as well as other famous architects. You can keep browsing through these related topics all day long.

If Google gets something wrong, you can report a problem right from the box. It will monitor corrections and correct its database, and it will generate a report for its outside data sources like Wikipedia.

How Google's Knowledge Graph Works

The Knowledge Graph brings to bear some technology Google has been working on for a while. In particular, it leans on its acquisition of Freebase in 2010. Freebase is a structured database of semantic information. It maps synonyms to help Google understand the meaning of words. It also incorporates other "gigantic, messy, redundant datasets" like Wikipedia, the World CIA Factbook, and Google Books. Some of it is freely available and some of it is licensed.

Our Google Search Interview Series:

Google won't comment on the exact mix of sources (or the business deals involved), but Search project manager Johanna Wright says that "comprehensiveness is the goal." So far, that amounts to 500 million people, places and things and 3.5 billion defining attributes and connections.

As Google Fellow Ben Gomes told ReadWriteWeb in February, Google is going down the path of "understanding the relationships between things." By identifying the things in your query, Google can now provide you with all kinds of information about them, instead of just stacking up Web links.

For the next phase of search, there's a race on to see who can bridge the gap between the vague queries of the user - i.e. words - and the things they represent. Lately, Microsoft has been talking up its "entity engine," internally called Satori. With the new Bing, which began to roll out last week, Satori is a crucial component, identifying the things in a query and describing them in a new box called Snapshot. But Snapshot hasn't launched yet. Google got there first.

Search the World, Minus Plus?

Google-watchers will recall that Google has already radically changed its search this year. In January, it unveiled Search, plus Your World, its way of integrating personalized results into search using Google+. It was a controversial move, but at least you could turn it off.

It's worth noting that Google didn't mention Google+ or Search, plus Your World at all when it showed me the new Knowledge Graph features. In the slides, the toggle switch between "search" and "your world" weren't even there, as though the user had disabled personalized search in his preferences.

When I asked about it, Wright only said that "there really are not many changes to Search, plus Your World for now." When you search for a person, the Knowledge Graph will identify Google+ profiles as that person, but that's it. Today's launch is not about Google+. It's about Google. Remember Google? "Organizing the world's information?" If the Knowledge Graph is any indication, that Google is back.

Rolling Out the Knowledge Graph

As the Knowledge Graph grows up, Google wants to be able to answer complicated questions. Where can I find an amusement park with a vegetarian restaurant nearby? What is the coldest lake in the world in July? Now that Google recognizes the things in the query, it will be able to return answers, not just pages.

This is a big change. You'll see Knowledge Graph features in your searches about as often as you see Google Maps. It affects more queries than the entire launch of Universal Search did back in 2007, when Google added images, videos, news and books to its results.

Starting today, the Knowledge Graph is coming to English-language U.S. users on desktop, mobile and tablet searches from the browser. The native Google Search apps are coming soon, as are more countries and languages.

Lead image via Shutterstock

ReadWriteWeb: Read/Write Daily: Bionic Eyes That Can See Clearly

2012-05-16T16:45:00+00:00

Today's theme is improving on life. Nature did a pretty good job of engineering some hardy life forms. But now we're able to tinker with life ourselves.

We're further along than you might think.

Researchers have lifted the lid on turtle evolution, a perfect demonstration that technology is natural.

But now we have our own genetic ideas. We're able to triple the physical endurance of mice in the lab.

This paper shows that high-resolution prosthetic human eyes are possible!

Here are slightly and greatly more accessible articles about these bionic eyes.

We've also developed low-cost artificial leaves that perform photosynthesis, a leap forward for sustainable energy.

This is as much a work of art as science, but check out this video of "FaceForward," a robotic face sculpture shown last year at Burning Man.

Image via Shutterstock.

Past entries from Read/Write Daily

Slashdot: Judge to Oracle: A High Schooler Could Write rangeCheck

2012-05-16T16:30:00+00:00

mikejuk writes with an update on the Oracle vs Google Trial. From the article: "One month into the Oracle v Google trial, Judge William Alsup has revealed that he has, and still does, write code. Will this affect the outcome? I think so! After trying to establish that the nine lines in rangeCheck that were copied saved Google time in getting Android to market the lawyer making the case is interrupted by the judge which indicates he at least does understand how straightforward it would be to program rangeCheck from scratch: 'rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it — ' And the lawyer reveals he doesn't: 'I'm not an expert on Java — this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months.' Perhaps every judge should be a coding judge — it must make the law seem a lot simpler..." From yesterday; the Oracle lawyer was attempting to argue that Google profited by stealing rangeCheck since it allowed them to get to market faster than they would have had they wrote it from scratch. Groklaw, continuing its detailed coverage as always, has the motions filed today.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Interview With Ward Cunningham

2012-05-16T15:57:00+00:00

CowboyRobot writes "Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki, wrote the Fit test framework, is the co-inventor of CRC cards, and is now promoting the concept of technical debt. He recently won the Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award and was interviewed by that publication. 'The creator of the Wiki dishes on the Wiki, Wikipedia's policies, OO design, technical debt, CoffeeScript and Perl, how to survive as a veteran programmer, and doing the simplest thing that could possibly work.' Cunningham is given the chance to explain his philosophy of coding: 'I like the picture and I like the look of the code. It's only 40 lines, but every line carried some careful thought. There was a learning curve there that surprised me because the programs looked short. The most rewarding work I've done this year is digging through that code and understanding what it does and understanding what it didn't do, and how to approach the problem.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: HTC One X Phone Held by Customs Due to ITC Ruling

2012-05-16T15:25:00+00:00

zacharye writes, quoting BGR: "The launch of Sprint's flagship EVO 4G LTE has been delayed indefinitely and supply of AT&T's flagship HTC One X will be constrained as a result of ongoing patent disputes between HTC and Apple. HTC confirmed in a statement emailed to BGR on Tuesday evening that shipments of its new EVO 4G LTE and One X smartphones have been held up by United States Customs as part of an International Trade Commission investigation. Before the phones can clear Customs, the ITC will need to determine that HTC's new handsets are in compliance with an earlier ruling..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthony Volodkin is fascinated: “Fatass” on Rosenthaler Straße, ouside of CCCP bar,...

2012-05-16T15:24:47+00:00

“Fatass” on Rosenthaler Straße, ouside of CCCP bar, fittingly

IEEE Multimedia: PrePrint: The Community and the Crowd: Developing large-scale data collections for multimedia benchmarking

2012-05-16T15:18:50+00:00

Multimedia researchers developing innovative algorithms benefit from the increasing ease with which large amounts of data can be collected from the Internet. However, it remains challenging to identify use cases and design tasks that will drive the state of the art forward and also to generate the ground truth necessary for evaluation. This article discusses how multimedia data collection design and development can be supported by benchmarking communities and how high-quality ground truth can be affordably generated by crowdsourcing. We discuss the importance of the benchmarking community in focusing research effort on specific highly-promising tasks, while simultaneously encouraging innovation. The article also discusses a large set of Internet videos that was developed by the MediaEval benchmarking initiative and used as the basis for two separate tasks, Genre Tagging and Rich Speech Retrieval, based on two different use cases and using two contrasting methods of ground truth generation.

ReadWriteWeb: Why the iPad Works for Writing

2012-05-16T15:02:00+00:00

When the first iPad launched in 2010, critics were quick to lampoon the device for being geared too heavily toward content consumption. The criticisms weren't entirely without merit, especially considering that the first-generation iPad didn't even have a camera, and external media slots are still nowhere to be found.

Over time, the iPad has evolved into something that's much more creation-friendly. It still doesn't compare to a desktop or laptop computer for many things, but it's great for quite a few others. Writing is one of them.

I happen to write things for a living, but the practice is far from limited to those who earn a paycheck by doing it. Some of us just enjoy emptying the thoughts from our heads, while many others have a professional obligation to be good at communicating with words. Whatever one's purpose - journaling, drafting stories or composing work-related documents - the iPad is a pretty good place to put words together.

It's Easier to Focus

One of the aforementioned early criticisms actually turns out to be part of what makes the iPad ideal for writing. Unlike a desktop computer, the device is designed to allow the user to focus on only one thing at a time. When one needs to focus on stringing together words without the distractions that so easily flood a desktop computer, the one-task-at-a-time nature of the iPad is a blessing.

To be sure, there are distraction-free writing apps for Windows and Mac desktops, and it's not exactly rocket science to simply close one's IM, email and Twitter clients for an hour or two. Still, fine-tuning the desktop for optimal focus requires effort, while tablets just sort of work that way by default. It's a great alternative to the desktop, especially with the right tools.

From Apps to Accessories, the Tools Make the Experience

When you unbox an iPad, it's not necessarily ready for an optimal experience of sustained writing. It's pretty close, though. The native Notes app is fine enough, and the touchscreen keyboard gets the job done, but to really make the most of the device's potential, third-party accessories and writing-specific apps are required.

To turn the iPad into a true writing machine, a physical keyboard of some kind is necessary. I've always been happy with Apple's own Bluetooth keyboard, but there are, of course, other options, including cases that come with a built-in keyboard.

For personal journaling, DayOne is is a fantastic app. A few of us here at ReadWriteWeb use it and love it. It sports a sleek design, helpful writing prompts and cross-device syncing via DropBox or iCloud. Other popular options include Momento and Maxjournal.

There's still something to be said for keeping a paper-and-pen journal, but taking one's journal into the digital realm is nice because our devices tend to be integrated a little more seamlessly into our lives than paper-based books. It's easy enough to keep a paper journal in your bag, but have you ever tried jotting down your thoughts with a pen on a moving subway car? Not so smooth. You might not carry your iPad everywhere you go, but most good writing apps for iOS can sync across devices, enabling access from virtually anywhere.

For less personal writing, apps like iA Writer are worthy of their hype. I often use iA Writer to draft stories on my iPad and then return to them later on my laptop, where I put them into our content management system, do some basic formatting and publish them.

The formatting ability is a crucial distinction between tablets and desktops/laptops. When it comes to loading content into a print layout or website CMS, or adding images and other formatting, those things are still best handled on a "real" computer.

iA Writer's "Focus" feature greys out every line of text except for the one you're currently typing. The Mac version does the same thing, but with more potential distractions chiming and buzzing in the background. There are several other distraction-free writing apps out there. For the iPad, ByWord, OmmWriter and CleanWriter are popular choices. They're all very sparse on features and formatting choices, but the best ones support MarkDown syntax.

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: Velocity Profile: Justin Huff

Mac Slocum — 2012-05-16T15:00:00+00:00

This is part of the Velocity Profiles series, which highlights the work and knowledge of web ops and performance experts.

Justin Huff
Software Engineer
PicMonkey
@jjhuff

How did you get into web operations and performance?

Picnik's founders Mike Harrington and Darrin Massena needed someone who knew something about Linux. Darrin and I had known each other for a few years, so my name came up. At the time, I was doing embedded systems work, but ended up moonlighting for Picnik. It wasn't long before I came over full time. I always expected to help them get off the ground and then they'd find a "real sysadmin" to take over. Turns out, I ended up enjoying ops! I was lucky enough to straddle the world between ops and back-end dev. Sound familiar?

What is your most memorable project?

Completing a tight database upgrade at a Starbucks mid-way between Seattle and Portland. "Replicate faster, PLEASE!" Also, in the build-up to Picnik's acquisition by Google, Mike asked me what it would take to handle 10 times our current traffic and to do it in 30 days. We doubled Picnik's hardware, including a complete network overhaul. It went flawlessly and continued to serve Picnik until Google shut it down in April of this year.

What's the toughest problem you've had to solve?

When Flickr launched with Picnik as its photo editor, we started to see really weird behavior causing some Flickr API calls to hang. I spent a good chunk of that day on the phone with John Allspaw and finally identified an issue with how our NAT box was munging TCP timestamps that were interacting badly with Flickr's servers. I learned a couple things: First, both John and I were able to gather highly detailed info (tcpdumps) at key points in our networks (and hosts) — sometimes you just have to go deep; second, it's absolutely imperative that you have good technical contacts with your partners.

What tools and techniques do you rely on most?

Graphs and monitoring are critical. Vim, because I can't figure out Emacs. Automation, because I can't even remember what I had for breakfast.

Who do you follow in the web operations and performance world?

Bryan Berry (@bryanwb) is great. Joe Williams (@williamsjoe) is doing great stuff — and his Twitter profile pic is awesome.

What is your web operations and performance super power?

I think I'm good at building, maintaining, and understanding complete systems. Other engineering disciplines are typically concerned about the details of a single part of a larger system. As web engineers, we have to grok the system, the components, and their interactions ... at 2 AM.

Velocity 2012: Web Operations & Performance — The smartest minds in web operations and performance are coming together for the Velocity Conference, being held June 25-27 in Santa Clara, Calif.

Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20

Related:

See more Velocity Profiles

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tomkeays] The Node Beginner Book » A comprehensive Node.js tutorial

2012-05-16T14:59:39+00:00

The aim of this document is to get you started with developing applications with Node.js, teaching you everything you need to know about "advanced" JavaScript along the way.This document will probably fit best for readers that have a background similar to my own: experienced with at least one object-oriented language like Ruby, Python, PHP or Java, only little experience with JavaScript, and completely new to Node.js. Aiming at developers that already have experience with other programming languages means that this document won't cover really basic stuff like data types, variables, control structures and the likes. You already need to know about these to understand this document.

Slashdot: Calculating Total Network Capacity

2012-05-16T14:59:00+00:00

New submitter slashbill writes "MIT's working on a way to measure network capacity. Seems no one really knows how much data their network can handle. Makes you wonder about how then do you calculate expense when building out capacity? From the article: 'Recently, one of the most intriguing developments in information theory has been a different kind of coding, called network coding, in which the question is how to encode information in order to maximize the capacity of a network as a whole. For information theorists, it was natural to ask how these two types of coding might be combined: If you want to both minimize error and maximize capacity, which kind of coding do you apply where, and when do you do the decoding?'" This is a synopsis of the first of two papers on the topic.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthony Volodkin is fascinated: Of course if there a Google Maps spam issue/bug in Berlin data,...

2012-05-16T14:36:00+00:00

Of course if there a Google Maps spam issue/bug in Berlin data, it’s to replace a street name with a name of a record store #ohberlin

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: A federal judge learned to code

Mike Loukides — 2012-05-16T14:30:00+00:00

The last couple of days, there's been a fair amount of blogosphere angst over Coding Horror's "Please Don't Learn to Code." Ironically, the best argument for learning to code appeared this morning, when it turned out that Judge William Alsup in the Google case could program, and learned Java in the course of the trial, and wasn't going for Oracle's claim that a short range-checking function was days of work. Alsup recognized immediately (and says he wrote the function hundreds of times during the course of the trial) that it's just a few minutes work for a competent programmer.

The importance of learning to code isn't so that everyone will write code, and bury the world under billions of lines of badly conceived Python, Java, and Ruby. The importance of code is that it's a part of the world we live in. I've had enough of legislators who think the Internet is about tubes, who haven't the slightest idea about legitimate uses for file transfer utilities, and no concept at all about what privacy (and the invasion of privacy) might mean in an online space. I've had enough of patent inspectors who approve patents for which prior art has existed for decades. And I've had enough of judges making rulings after listening to lawyers arguing about technologies they don't understand. Learning to code won't solve these problems, but coding does force engagement with technology on a level other than pure ignorance.

Coding is a part of cultural competence, even if you never do it professionally. Alsup is a modern hero.

Slashdot: General Motors: "Facebook Ads Aren't Worth It"

2012-05-16T14:19:00+00:00

Fluffeh writes "General Motors spends around $40 million per year on maintaining a Facebook profile and around a quarter of that goes into paid advertising. However, in a statement, they just announced that 'it's simply not working.' That's a bit of bad news just prior to the Facebook IPO — and while Daniel Knapp tries to sweeten the news, he probably makes it even more bitter by commenting 'Advertising on Facebook has long been funded by marketing budgets reserved for trying new things. But as online advertising investments in general are surging and starting to cannibalize spend on legacy media, advertisers are rightfully asking whether the money spend is justified because it has reached significant sums now.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: How to start a successful business in health care at Health 2.0 conference

Andy Oram — 2012-05-16T14:10:14+00:00

Great piles of cash are descending on entrepreneurs who develop health care apps, but that doesn't make it any easier to create a useful one that your audience will adopt. Furthermore, lowered costs and streamlined application development technique let you fashion a working prototype faster than ever, but that also reduces the time you can fumble around looking for a business model. These were some of the insights I got at Spring Fling 2012: Matchpoint Boston, put on by Health 2.0 this week.

This conference was a bit of a grab-bag, including one-on-one meetings between entrepreneurs and their potential funders and customers, keynotes and panels by health care experts, round-table discussions among peers, and lightning-talk demos. I think the hallway track was the most potent part of this conference, and it was probably planned that way. The variety at the conference mirrors the work of Health 2.0 itself, which includes local chapters, challenges, an influential blog, and partnerships with a range of organizations. Overall, I appreciated the chance to get a snapshot of a critical industry searching for ways to make a positive difference in the world while capitalizing on ways to cut down on the blatant waste and mismanagement that bedevil the multi-trillion-dollar health care field.

Let's look, for instance, at the benefits of faster development time. Health IT companies go through fairly standard early stages (idea, prototype, incubator, venture capital funding) but cochairs Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt showed slides demonstrating that modern techniques can leave companies in the red for less time and accelerate earnings. On the other hand, Jonathan Bush of athenahealth gave a keynote listing bits of advice for company founders and admitting that his own company had made significant errors that required time to recover from. Does the fast pace of modern development leave less room for company heads to make the inevitable mistakes?

I also heard Margaret Laws, director of the California HealthCare Foundation's Innovations Fund, warn that most of the current applications being developed for health care aim to salve common concerns among doctors or patients but don't address what she calls the "crisis points" in health care. Brad Fluegel of Health Evolution Partners observed that, with the flood of new entrepreneurs in health IT, a lot of old ideas are being recycled without adequate attention to why they failed before.

I'm afraid this blog is coming out too negative, focusing on the dour and the dire, but I do believe that health IT needs to acknowledge its risks in order to avoid squandering the money and attention it's getting, and on the positive side to reap the benefits of this incredibly fertile moment of possibilities in health care. Truly, there's a lot to celebrate in health IT as well. Here are some of the fascinating start-ups I saw at the show:

hellohealth aims at that vast area of health care planning and administration that cries out for efficiency improvements--the area where we could do the most good by cutting costs without cutting back on effective patient care. Presenter Shahid Shah described the company as the intersection of patient management with revenue cycle management. They plan to help physicians manage appointments and follow-ups better, and rationalize the whole patient experience.

hellohealth will offer portals for patients as well. They're unique, so far as I know, in charging patients for certain features.

Corey Booker demo'd onPulse, which aims to bring together doctors with groups of patients, and patients with groups of the doctors treating them. For instance, when a doctor finds an online article of interest to diabetics, she can share it with all the patients in her practice suffering from diabetes. onPulse also makes it easier for a doctor to draw in others who are treating the same patient. The information built up about their interactions can be preserved for billing.

onPulse overlaps in several respects with HealthTap, a doctor-patient site that I've covered several times and for which an onPulse staffer expressed admiration. But HealthTap leaves discussions out in the open, whereas onPulse connects doctors and patients in private.

HealthPasskey.com is another one of these patient/doctor services with a patient portal. It allows doctors to upload continuity of care documents in the standard CCD format to the patient's site, and supports various services such as making appointments.

A couple weeks ago I reported a controversy over hospitals' claims that they couldn't share patient records with the patients. Check out the innovative services I've just highlighted here as a context for judging whether the technical and legal challenges for hospitals are really too daunting. I recognize that each of the sites I've described pick off particular pieces of the EHR problem and that opening up the whole kit and kaboodle is a larger task, but these sites still prove that all the capabilities are in place for institutions willing to exploit them.

GlobalMed has recently released a suitcase-sized box that contains all the tools required to do a standard medical exam. This allows traveling nurse practitioners or other licensed personnel to do a quick check-up at a patient's location without requiring a doctor or a trip to the clinic. Images can also be taken. Everything gets uploaded to a site where a doctor can do an assessment and mark up records later. The suitcase weighs about 30 pounds, rolls on wheels, and costs about $30,000 (price to come down if they start manufacturing in high quantities).

SwipeSense won Health 2.0's 100 Day Innovation Challenge. They make a simple device that hospital staff can wear on their belts and wipe their hands on. This may not be as good as washing your hands, but takes advantage of people's natural behavior and reduces the chance of infections. It also picks up when someone is using the device and creates reports about compliance. SwipeSense is being tested at the Rush University Medical Center.

Thryve, one of several apps that helps you track your food intake and make better choices, won the highest audience approval at Thursday's Launch! demos.

Winner of last weekend's developer challenge was No Sleep Kills, an app that aims to reduce accidents related to sleep deprivation (I need a corresponding app to guard against errors from sleep-deprived blogging). You can enter information on your recent sleep patterns and get back a warning not to drive.

It's worth noting that the last item in that list, No Sleep Kills, draws information from Health and Human Services's Healthy People site. This raises the final issue I want to bring up in regard to the Spring Fling. Sophisticated developers know their work depends heavily on data about public health and on groups of patients. HHS has actually just released another major trove of public health statistics. Our collective knowledge of who needs help, what works, and who best delivers the care would be immensely enhanced if doctors and institutions who currently guard their data would be willing to open it up in aggregate, non-identifiable form. I recently promoted this ideal in coverage of Sage Congress.

In the entirely laudable drive to monetize improvements in health care, I would like the health IT field to choose solutions that open up data rather than keep it proprietary. One of the biggest problems with health care, in this age of big data and incredibly sophisticated statistical tools, is our tragedy of the anti-commons where each institution seeks to gain competitive advantage through hoarding its data. They don't necessarily use their own data in socially beneficial ways, either (they're more interested in ratcheting up opportunities for marketing expensive care). We need collective sources of data in order to make the most of innovation.

ReadWriteWeb: The Truth About Why Yahoo's CEO Got Fired

2012-05-16T14:02:00+00:00

What's the takeaway from Yahoo's recent CEO fiasco? Don't lie on your corporate bio, for one, and make sure no one else has lied on your behalf. But the real lesson has nothing to do with falsified credentials.

Sure, the world will remember Scott Thompson as the Yahoo CEO who got fired over a fake computer science degree, but the context is crucial: A battle with Yahoo shareholder Dan Loeb for control of the company. If not for Loeb, we may never have found out about Thompson's juiced resume, and he might still be CEO. The real lesson is: Beware the activist investor.

Four months had passed since Thompson's appointment as Yahoo CEO, and no one had questioned his education. His relevant experience at PayPal? Sure, at first. But not his computer science degree. In fact, many of us actually thought that especially qualified him for the Yahoo job.

In hindsight, Yahoo obviously should have investigated Thompson's background more thoroughly. (And shame on us in the press for missing this one!) But even if Yahoo had found the discrepancy after Thompson was named CEO, it might have quietly corrected the mistake and hoped no one noticed.

It is possible to survive a scandal over a college degree you wish you'd earned but didn't. When RadioShack CEO David Edmondson resigned in 2006 after a newspaper reported that his two supposed degrees were invented and that he was facing a trial for DUI charges, the company said its board had known about “some, but definitely not all” of the issues. (I suppose it makes a difference which ones.) But former Bausch & Lomb CEO Ronald Zarrella stayed around for years after he was busted for falsely claiming an MBA from New York University.

In this case, there was no pushing anything under the rug. it was Loeb himself who outed Thompson, in a letter to Yahoo's board that he made public in a press release.

"According to the Yahoo! Form 10-K/A, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 27, 2012, newly-hired Chief Executive Officer, Scott Thompson, 'holds a Bachelor's degree in accounting and computer science' from Stonehill College," it read. "A rudimentary Google search reveals a Stonehill College alumni announcement stating that Mr. Thompson's degree is in accounting only." Whoops.

Did Loeb actually care about Thompson's level of educational attainment? Probably not. This was a power play, pure and simple. And it worked. (Note that Loeb's activist website, ValueYahoo, is already taken down.) If Loeb hadn't hit the jackpot with the degree accusation - or if Thompson and Yahoo successfully brushed it off - he would have come back, again and again, until either he or his adversary crumbled.

But with the mess Yahoo is in - even after Thompson's four months on the job - Loeb finally had the mob on his side. And now he's on top.

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: The chicken and egg of big data solutions

Jim Stogdill — 2012-05-16T14:00:00+00:00

Before I came to O'Reilly I was building the "big data and disruptive analytics practice" at a major systems integrator. It was a blast to spend every week talking to customers in different industries who were waking up to the possibilities that technologies like Hadoop offered their businesses. Many of these businesses are going to fundamentally change as they embrace this stuff (or be replaced by those that do). But there's a catch.

Twenty years or so ago large integrators made big business building applications on the then-new relational paradigm. They put in Oracle databases with custom code, wrote PowerBuilder apps on Sybase, and of course lots of businesses rolled their own with VB and SQL Server. It was an era of custom coding where Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, Informix and etc. were thought of as platforms to build stuff on.

Then the market matured and shifted to package solution implementation. ERP, CRM, …, etc. The big guys focused on integrating again and told their clients there was no ROI in building custom stuff. ROI would come from integrating best-of-breed solutions. Databases became commodity back ends to the applications that were always the real focus.

Now along comes big data, NoSQL, data science, and all that stuff and it seems like we're starting the cycle over again. But this time clients, having been well trained over the last decade or so, aren't having any of that "build it from scratch" mentality. They know that Hadoop and other new technologies can be transformative to their business, but they want it packaged up and solution'ified like they are used to. I heard a lot of "let us know when you have a solution already built or available to buy that does X" in the last year.

Also, lots of the shops that do this stuff at scale are built and staffed around the package implementation model and have shed many of the skills they used to have for custom work. Everything from staffing models to methodologies are oriented toward package installation.

So, here we are with all of this disruptive technology, but we seem to have lost the institutional wherewithal to do anything with it in a lot of large companies. Of course that fact was hard on my numbers. I had a great pipeline of companies with pain to solve, and great technologies to solve it, but too much of the time it was hard to close it without readymade solutions.

Every week I talked to the companies building these new platforms to share leads and talk about their direction. After a while I started cutting them off when they wanted to talk about the features of their next release. I just got to the point where I didn't really care, it just wasn't all that relevant to my customers. I mean, it's important that they are making the platforms more manageable and building bridges to traditional BI, ETL, RDBMS, and the like. But the focus was too much on platforms and tools.

I wanted to know "What are you doing to encourage solution development? Are you staffing a support system for ISVs? What startups and/or established players are you aware of that are building solutions on this platform?" So when I saw this tweet I let out a little yelp. Awesome! The lack of ready-to-install solutions was getting attention, and from Mike Olsen.

Cloudera CEO wants startups to build Hadoop apps. He will connect you to funding. #dataconf
— MJHarkins (@uberjake42) March 21, 2012

You can watch the rest of what Mike Olson said here and you'll find he tells a similar story about the RDBMS historical parallel.

I talked to Mike a few weeks ago to find out what was behind his comment and explore what else they are doing to support solution development. It boils down to what he said — he will help connect you with money — plus a newly launched partner program designed to provide better support to ISVs among others. Also, the continued attention to APIs and tools like Pig and Hive should make it easier for the solution ecosystem to develop. It can only be good for his business to have lots of other companies directly solving business problems, and simply pulling in his platform.

Hortonworks also started a partner program in the fall and I think we'll see a lot more emphasis on this across the space this year. However, at the moment wherever I look (Hortonworks partners, Cloudera Partners, Accel big data portfolio) the focus today remains firmly on platform and tools or partnering with integrators. Tresata, a startup focused on financial risk management, pops up in in a lot of lists as the obvious odd one out — an actual domain-specific solution.

What about other people that could be building solutions? Is it the maturity level of the technology, the lack of penetration of Hadoop etc. into your customer's data centers, or some combination of other factors that is slowing things down?

Of course, during the RDBMS adoption it took a lot of years before the custom era was over and thoroughly replaced by the era of package implementation. The question I'm pondering is whether customer expectations and the pace of technology will make it happen faster this time? Or is the disruptive value of big data going to continue to accrue only to risk-taking early adopters for the foreseeable future?

If you are building a startup based on a solution or application that leverages big data technology, and you aren't being stealthy, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Related:

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tomkeays] iExplorer - Formerly iPhone Explorer, is an iPhone browser for Mac and PC

2012-05-16T13:55:02+00:00

iExplorer, formerly called iPhone Explorer, lets you use an iPhone or iPad in disk mode, like a flash drive. iExplorer is an iPhone browser or iPad file explorer that runs on Mac & PC that lets you browse the files and folders on your iPhone as if it were a normal USB flash drive or pen drive. You can use the easy drag-and-drop methods to add or remove files and folders from the iPhone.

Slashdot: Moving From CouchDB To MySQL

2012-05-16T13:37:00+00:00

itwbennett writes "Sauce Labs had outgrown CouchDB and too much unplanned downtime made them switch to MySQL. With 20-20 hindsight they wrote about their CouchDB experience. But Sauce certainly isn't the first organization to switch databases. Back in 2009, Till Klampaeckel wrote a series of blog posts about moving in the opposite direction — from MySQL to CouchDB. Klampaeckel said the decision was about 'using the right tool for the job.' But the real story may be that programmers are never satisfied with the tool they have." Of course, then they say things like: "We have a TEXT column on all our tables that holds JSON, which our model layer silently treats the same as real columns for most purposes. The idea is the same as Rails' ActiveRecord::Store. It’s not super well integrated with MySQL's feature set — MySQL can’t really operate on those JSON fields at all — but it’s still a great idea that gets us close to the joy of schemaless DBs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Loomio: Making Better Decisions Remotely Possible

2012-05-16T13:33:00+00:00

Email, instant messaging, forums, code forges and other collaboration tools make it possible for distributed teams to get work done - but they're not great tools for making decisions. The team behind Loomio wants to solve that with a new Web-based tool for focused, concise discussions that allow all team members to be heard.

If you've ever worked with a distributed team, you know how difficult it can be to make decisions as a group. Discussions are unstructured, rambling affairs with dozens of messages flying about and no good way to track consensus. Even worse, requests for feedback can go without comment entirely, or with only a few stakeholders raising a voice.

Agree, Disagree, Abstain, Block

Discussion in Loomio starts with a discussion and specific proposal, and members have the option of voting on the proposal. A group can define the options (defaults are yes/no, abstain and block), and each member can give their view summary. As votes are tallied, everyone can see get a chart that shows how many folks are in agreement, how many aren't, how many have abstained, etc.

This sounds pretty simple, but most of today's collaboration tools don't provide a good way to focus a discussion. The key to Loomio is that it provides a central tool for discussions and (if used properly) narrows things down to decisions that are easy to vote on. Central is key here. It helps a lot to confine activity to one tool rather than making users look all over for information.

A lot of online teams communicate in several ways, including email, IM, IRC, over the phone and face to face. Stakeholders who prefer one medium (like email) lose out if discussions are held in IRC, or vice-versa. Even worse, stakeholders may be totally unaware a decision is being made at all. If a group settles on Loomio, it would enable the group to say "decisions are made here and nowhere else." If something isn't put up in Loomio (or another approved tool), then a decision wouldn't be legitimate.

Settling on a decision tool like Loomio should also help cut down on noise in other communication channels. It's popular to have discussions in email and CC everyone who might have an opinion or might need to vote on something. An active team can inspire email fatigue pretty quickly with discussions that are neverending. Loomio would allow users to visit, vote and get back to work.

Actually, Loomio isn't only for distributed teams. There's no reason it couldn't be used in any organization, but its especially appropriate for situations where team members or stakeholders are far-flung.

Can Loomio Solve the Problem?

Like any tool, Loomio would only be effective if used properly. The early design could probably do with some modification - a more obvious start and end date for votes, for example - but the initial design is solid. The Loomio team says it's already in use by some organizations. New Zealand companies or organizations like Enspiral and BuckyBox are among the first adopters - though no one seems to be providing a public instance that we can point to.

If you want to help, the group is looking for contributions from Ruby on Rails developers, as well as a little extra cash (NZ $5,000) to help the volunteer team devote more time to Loomio development. The project is sort-of open source and already on GitHub. It's "sort-of" open source because the site says it's open source, but if you look at the license text on GitHub it's basically a stump saying: "We need to add the license. GPLv2?" The pledge drive (through the Pledge Me platform) ends on May 18th. The developers have already raised more than their target, but more money might mean more time spent on development.

If adopted a bit more widely, Loomio might help take distributed teams to a new level - much like GitHub has helped with development. It is a simple concept, but bringing order to decision-making could help teams communicate better and make better decisions, no matter where they happen to be located.

TorrentFreak: Pirate Bay Under DDoS Attack From Unknown Enemy

2012-05-16T13:12:22+00:00

Although Pirate Bay downtime happens a handful of times each month, it rarely persists for more than a few hours. When it goes beyond that the steady flow of reader emails to TorrentFreak quickly transforms itself into a torrent.

At the time of writing The Pirate Bay has been inaccessible to most of the world for nearly 24 hours and our ‘inbox’ is suffering. But it appears to be the timing of the downtime that has caused more people than usual to panic.

The root lies in the recent court-ordered censorship of The Pirate Bay in the UK. The country’s leading ISPs are required to block the site so millions of people were already expecting to have trouble accessing the domain. What they didn’t anticipate was the failure of the many published workarounds to resupply access to the site.

For those to work the site itself has to be working properly and currently it is not. While TPB is used to being censored by courts and ISPs, it is a little less used to being blacked-out by other means. TorrentFreak is informed by a Pirate Bay insider that the site is currently being subjected to a DDoS attack rendering it unavailable in many parts of the world.

Now, while we’re informed that the problem might be mitigated during the next few hours, the timing of this attack against the site is either ironic, ‘interesting’ or at the very least coincidental, depending on your viewpoint.

Just last week, The Pirate Bay openly criticized elements of the ‘Anonymous’ collective for carrying out a DDoS attack on Virgin Media, the first UK ISP to block access to The Pirate Bay.

“We do NOT encourage these actions. We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us,” said TPB in response to the DDoS attack against Virgin.

“So don’t fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship.”

Right now, whoever is attacking The Pirate Bay has achieved what no copyright or governmental authority anywhere in the world has – an almost complete disruption of the site’s operations on a global basis with no court order required.

But despite the DDoS there are still ways for people to access the site. A handful of the proxies set up to circumvent the ISP blockades still appear to work and, when all else fails, the crazy methods still work too.

Source: Pirate Bay Under DDoS Attack From Unknown Enemy

Slashdot: CPU Competition Heating Up In 2012?

2012-05-16T12:55:00+00:00

jd writes "2012 promises to be a fun year for hardware geeks, with three new 'Aptiv-class' MIPS64 cores being circulated in soft form, a quad-core ARM A15, a Samsung ARM A9 variant, a seriously beefed-up 8-core Intel Itanium and AMD's mobile processors. There's a mix here of chips actually out, ready to be put on silicon, and in last stages of development. Obviously these are for different users (mobile CPUs don't generally fight for marketshare with Itanium dragsters) but it is still fascinating to see the differences in approach and the different visions of what is important in a modern CPU. Combine this with the news reported earlier on DDR4, and this promises to be a fun year with many new machines likely to appear that are radically different from the last generation. Which leaves just one question — which Linux architecture will be fully updated first?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Google's Grand Android Plan

2012-05-16T12:13:00+00:00

CWmike writes with news of a significant change in Google's strategy for Android. According to a Wall Street Journal report, "Google plans to give multiple mobile-device makers early access to new releases of Android and to sell those devices directly to consumers, said people familiar with the matter. That is a shift from Google's previous practice, when it joined with only one hardware maker at a time to produce 'lead devices,' before releasing the software to other device makers. Those lead devices were then sold to consumers through wireless carriers or retailers." JR Raphael adds, "Signs of something big have been brewing in AndroidLand for some time now: First, we've had the increasingly loud buzz about Google's top-secret mission to build an inexpensive Nexus-like tablet. Then, last month, Google opened the door to selling unlocked Nexus devices directly to consumers, eliminating the need for carrier meddling and contract commitments. Now, at long last, we're getting a glimpse at what's likely the final piece of the puzzle."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Miller - The Cloud of Data: CloudCamp reaches Leeds on 14 June

Paul Miller — 2012-05-16T12:10:21+00:00

County Arcade, Leeds

The global CloudCamp movement continues to grow, with events over the next few weeks in Denmark, Germany, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and across the United States. And now, I’m very pleased to announce that the English city of Leeds is joining the party.

CloudCamp events have been taking place in the UK for years, and the London gatherings have picked up real momentum. Outside London, we’ve seen a few events in Warrington, Newcastle, and Edinburgh. We believe that the time is now right for something more regular; a place in which the cloud-building, cloud-using, cloud-interested and cloud-exploring can come together for talk, beer, pizza and more… without having to jump on a train to the deep south.

CloudCamps are interesting events, with a real emphasis on informality. I’ve attended several around the world, and am always impressed by the energy in the room, and by the welcome extended to newcomers. As the main CloudCamp site describes,

“CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.”

Jeremy Jarvis at Brightbox and Karyn Fleeting and Joel Turner at Tinderbox Media have been driving this event forward, and they’ve invited me on board to help out. I also get to be MC on the night.

We’ve got speakers and sponsors committed, with more of both to come. If you think you should be one of those doing the speaking or the sponsoring, do let us know.

So, if you like talking Cloud, if your boss has ordered you to learn Cloud, or if you’re just keen to understand a little more about what this Cloud thing can do for you, stick the evening of 14 June in your diary, sign up (for free) on Eventbrite, and come along to the Hilton DoubleTree in Leeds for an evening of fun, learning, beer, and more.

See you there!

Image of the County Arcade in Leeds by Flickr user Francisco Perez

ReadWriteWeb: 9 Ways to Convince Your Parents to Support Your Startup - Not Just Financially

2012-05-16T12:00:00+00:00

For many young entrepreneurs, getting their parents’ support for a new venture can make a huge difference - emotionally, practically and even financially. But it’s not always easy to explain to Mom and Dad why, instead of getting a “real job,” you’re putting everything on the line to create a new technology startup. It can be done, though, and these youthful startup veterans explain how:

Tip #1: Don’t get too full of yourself. “Show your parents that you have thought [your idea] through to the long term, not just what you hope happens in six months,” says Kelsey Meyer, Vice President of Digital Talent Agents. “Also, do not try to compare yourself to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram - those are the exceptions, not the rule, and parents know it.”

Tip #2: Do your homework. Scott Thompson left a comfortable career with a good salary and excellent health benefits to start a business 5,000 miles from home as part of the entrepreneurship program Start-Up Chile. “After their initial reaction of shock, sadness and worry, they quickly came around to being the #1 fans of my startup, Bungolow.com,” Thompson says. His parents provided expertise in graphic design, including helping design the company’s first logo. “Their support was influenced not only by unconditional love, but also the fact that it was clear I had done my homework, and that it was not just a spur-of-the-moment decision,” says Thompson. “I was thorough in explaining why I wanted to do it, and why this was the time to do it.”

Tip #3: See their perspective. “Until my third year of being self-employed, my parents - who are baby boomers - thought I was out of my mind,” says Faiyaz Farouk, whose company, S2 Leadership Consultants, advises businesses on working with Gen X and Gen Y employees. The strategy that won them over? “Understand and respect where they are coming from,” advises Farouk. “Use their values, and talk from their perspective, without losing your ground on your decision.”

Tip #4: Keep them in the loop. The concept for Eric Dresdale’s startup, a prepaid debit card launching in July, is all about seeking support from your family. “I wouldn’t have been able to launch this business without the help of my parents,” says Dresdale, Managing Member of Next Step Network. “They have supported the idea financially and emotionally from its inception.” Garnering their support required clearly outlining the business plan to them as if they weren’t parents, but investors. “I also keep them apprised weekly of headway being made with clients.”

Aron Susman, co-founder of TheSquareFoot Tip #5: Convince them of your passion. “My parents are in their mid-60s, and I believe with age comes an appreciation for life,” says Aron Susman, cofounder of TheSquareFoot, a site that helps small businesses find office space. “Even though I had spent five years at school to obtain my degrees, and my parents had sacrificed financially to make that happen, they knew that life is about the journey. They saw the passion I had for becoming an entrepreneur and wanted to support me in any way possible.”

Tip #6: Be completely honest. Seeing the hard work and dedication, Susman’s parents invested in TheSquareFoot about a year after the business began development. “Getting investment from family can change things very quickly,” Susman warns. “Make sure you have a strong enough relationship that this will not put on undue pressure. You must have ultimate trust between each other and talk through all the risks. Make sure they understand there’s a chance the investment won’t pan out. Lastly, make sure losing the money won’t impact their livelihoods or retirement.”

Wade Benz of USimprints.com

Tip #7: Show them what you bring to the table. When Wade Benz launched USimprints.com, an online provider of branded promotional products and imprinted giveaways, his parents not only let him live at home, but also let him work out of their basement, helped him with packing and shipping, and even financed most of the initial startup costs.

What convinced Benz’s dad, who had decades of experience in the industry, that his son could make a go of it? “He saw that I brought valuable qualities to the table,” says Benz. “My dad brought knowledge of our industry, initial contacts with vendors, some early customers and overall maturity. I brought a fresh perspective on the industry, forward thinking about where it was headed and an overall knowledge of technology, e-commerce and Internet marketing.” A year after launch, Benz’s father joined the company full time.

Tip #8: Explain your idea on their terms. “You have to instill confidence in them, not only that your idea is a good one, but also that you are capable of actually creating it, and convincing people to use it,” says Tashfeen Ekram, whose startup, SchedFull.com, helps physicians and other professionals fill cancelled appointments. “Selling it to them on their own terms is key. I had to explain the usefulness of the product from my father’s standpoint. We are trying to reduce wait times for doctors, and when he realized it could save him time and allow him to see his doctor sooner, he was sold [on its usefulness].”

Tip #9: Don’t gloss over potential problems. Ekram’s father is currently running his own startup, and has started other businesses in the past. This made winning parental support both easier - and harder - for Ekram. “My dad understood what it takes to be successful, and he knows that most startups fail, so I really needed to know what I was talking about,” says Ekram. When dealing with your parents, there’s no place to hide: “They know you very well,” says Ekram, “so you have to be honest about your shortcomings, where you might go wrong or potential problems in the business. My dad appreciated that, because someone who doesn’t have a good grasp of his shortcomings can never address them, and thus won’t realize when he is about to fail.”

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

ReadWriteWeb: S3 Storage for WordPress Blogs

2012-05-16T11:00:00+00:00

Looking to tap Amazon S3 storage for your WordPress blog? The WP2Cloud plugin lets you store all your WordPress data - not just media files - in S3.

The WP2Cloud plugin was developed by OblakSoft as a solution for Yet Another Picture Sharing Site (Yapixx). Yapixx is provided as a preconfigured Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for EC2 that uses WordPress and several extensions to provide an S3-hosted picture-sharing site.

But you don't have to run Yapixx or use Amazon EC2 at all if you prefer to use hosting elsewhere. All you need is the WP2Cloud plugin and the Cloud Storage Engine for MySQL (ClouSE). Note that ClouSE is mandatory. The plugin will error out if you try to install it without ClouSE available. Naturally, you need an AWS account and an S3 bucket to put files in, too. The full instructions are on the OblakSoft site.

Once it's installed, you can decide whether to go full monty or store only a portion of your content on S3. The benefit of using WP2Cloud is that you take a load off your Web server and let S3 serve up some or all of your content. That includes full posts, if you decide to use ClouSE to put MySQL data in S3 as well. As far as I know, WP2Cloud is the only plugin that puts post data in S3 rather than media only.

While Amazon is the only service that's supported right now, the WP2Cloud documentation indicates that support for other services may be on the horizon. It would be excellent if you could tap other cloud providers or open-source cloud stacks as well.

Other Options

The WP2Cloud plugin might not work well for some users. For example, it requires MySQL 5.5.19 or higher, but plenty of sites have older releases of MySQL. And it might be overkill if you only want to store large media, like videos, in S3 and leave the rest on the WordPress host.

The Amazon S3 for WordPress with CloudFront plugin stores files in S3 transparently and offers the option of using CloudFront. CloudFront is a content distribution network (CDN) that can be used to distribute content more quickly and mitigate traffic spikes.

If you're looking to offload video only to S3, you can use the S3 Video Plugin. It does what it says on the tin, though you may need to tweak some PHP parameters to upload large files to S3.

For sites with minimal traffic (like my personal blog), WP2Cloud is not necessary. But if you're trying to scale WordPress for a lot of traffic, particularly bursty traffic, then you should take a look at some of the cloud storage options to see if they'll help you reduce site load times and server load.

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from klamma] European Commission : CORDIS : Projects : Search

2012-05-16T10:49:13+00:00

Slashdot: Ask Slashdot: What If Intellectual Property Expired After Five Years?

2012-05-16T10:27:00+00:00

New submitter ancientt writes "As a thought experiment, what if the constitution of the U.S. was amended so that no idea (with exceptions only for government use, like currency) could be protected from copy or use beyond January 1, 2035 for more than a five-year period. After a five-year span, any patent, software license, copyright, software NDA or other intellectual property agreement would expire. (This is not an entirely new idea, but would have had significant recent ramifications if it had been enacted in the past.) Specific terms are up for debate, but in this experiment businesses must have time to try to adjust to sell services and make the services good enough to compete with other businesses offering the same basic products. Microsoft can sell a five-year-old variant of OSX, Apple can sell Windows 2030. Cars, computers and phones would, or at least could, still be made, but manufacturers would be free to use any technology more than five years old or license new technology for a five-year competitive edge. Movie, TV and book budgets would have to adjust to the potential five-year profit span, although staggered episode or chapter releases would be legal. Play 'What if' with me. What would be the downsides? What would be the upsides?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Top 10 Windows 8 Features #6: Secure Boot

2012-05-16T10:00:00+00:00

It's the single greatest dilemma of modern society: How much freedom would you trade to get more security - or vice versa? Since Windows XP became the most exploited operating system in history, Microsoft has taken bold moves - not all of them very popular, but usually very effective - to sever the routes of exploit. User Account Control, though controversial, eliminated perhaps 90% of account-elevation exploits. Now the company makes another bold security move - changing how Windows 8 boots to increase security, potentially at the cost of some freedom for certain users and non-commercial developers.

Microsoft Windows 8 will fully embrace a computer security architecture that has been a very long time in the making: the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), created in the 1990s by Intel, and developed later by a consortium that also includes AMD and embedded processor developer ARM. Essentially, UEFI performs the functions that ordinary BIOS used to perform (getting the components of your computer up to speed), but rather than following a set agenda, UEFI works like more of an operating system in itself, making sure your Windows (or Linux, or whatever other) OS is accessible, intact and legitimate before booting it. As with most security changes, though, there are side effects - particularly when working with some dual- and multi-boot Windows 8 machines.

Microsoft has made several demonstrations of UEFI support since announcing Windows 8 last September. The most convincing demonstration involves a thumb drive. Many computers, especially in the office, are geared to look for the presence of operating systems on thumb drives before hard drives, especially for purposes of recovery. Malicious users can plug thumb drive-based OSes directly into victims' systems, and perhaps gain access to the entire office network. But that's only if the computer's BIOS clears the thumb drive's operating system. With UEFI installed on the motherboard, it won't.

Many newer PCs already have UEFI in their firmware, and there's a good chance you're using it now. But with Windows 8, you would begin using it for what it was built for in the first place: restricting the loading of OSes to those that can prove themselves legitimate and untampered with. Once you install Windows 8 (as our tests with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview confirm), the OS-clearing capability of UEFI kicks in. With some firmware, you can turn off this option. Yet with quite a few systems, once this feature has kicked in, OSes that can't sign themselves are locked out.

One example, ironically, is a copy of Windows XP that was installed on a hard drive attached to a non-UEFI system. With UEFI fully engaged, you cannot boot to that XP-based drive in a multiboot system. The photo above shows a UEFI screen (not Windows 8, but system firmware) from an Intel Core i5-based 3.3 GHz PC I built. Note the UEFI banner attached to the drive where I've installed Windows 8 Consumer Preview. On this particular PC, I cannot (successfully) disengage secure boot. So I cannot boot my Windows XP disk - a fact which gives me only minor trouble with respect to testing software.

What the Lockdown Means

Trusted computing is what the entire commercial computing industry wants... the keyword here being "commercial." Not all computing is accomplished by commercial entities; and many would argue that some of the most important advances in computing in the last 10 years have come from developers who shunned commercial interests. At any rate, there is a considerable plurality of free software and hardware developers (free as in "free"), many of whom are in the Linux community, all of whom are legitimate artisans. They build computers and systems because they can, and because it's fun.

Because their community is not centered around vendors or commercial interests, there is no nucleus of authority responsible for what they build. This is how the community wants it. But it becomes a problem when the hardware platforms they rely upon adopt a protocol that equates legitimacy with commercial responsibility. Put simply, if you're not a vendor, there's no way you can "sign" your operating system for UEFI. And that may mean you can't set up a dual-boot system that includes both Windows 8 and a free Linux distribution.

By "free Linux," I'm referring to any noncommercial distribution, and Red Hat and Canonical have warned their distros (Fedora and Ubuntu, respectively) may be among them (Intel disagrees with respect to Fedora). This is not exactly the swap-meet crowd we're talking about, but a sizable bunch of legitimate PC users.

In this 10-part series, 26-year veteran Windows tester Scott Fulton walks us through the best features, faculties and functions of Windows 8.

No. 10 : Refresh and Reset

No. 9: File History

No. 8: Storage Spaces

No. 7: Client-side Hyper-V

As Red Hat mobile Linux developer Matthew Garrett first explained last September, "There is no centralised signing authority for these UEFI keys. If a vendor key is installed on a machine, the only way to get code signed with that key is to get the vendor to perform the signing. A machine may have several keys installed, but if you are unable to get any of them to sign your binary then it won't be installable."

Over the years, companies such as Microsoft and Intel have maintained that enthusiasts are free to build their systems using platforms that are not UEFI-enabled, and to install free Linux on them. This is becoming harder and harder, as the motherboard industry (Asus, MSI and Gigabyte, among others) has already embraced UEFI firmware. Almost by definition, a motherboard without UEFI is a cheap motherboard. Enthusiasts may like "free," but they abhor cheap.

More than once, Microsoft has reminded me of the relatively small size of the enthusiast community. But despite their numbers, they are an extraordinarily influential group. Commercial vendors that disrespect them are committing a blunder akin to a politician uttering a racial slur in front of a fellow with a cell phone camera.

Trust, UEFI and How We Got Here

At some point, Microsoft - now one of the co-architects of UEFI - had to take the plunge and support what's essentially its own work. The reason why concerns one of the most dreaded threats that every installed copy of Windows still faces.

In fact, for any computing device - be it a PC, a smartphone or a garage-door locking system - a malicious program could overwrite the contents of its operating system kernel, substituting what's come to be known as a rootkit. In this scenario, when you reboot your device, it isn't exactly what you think it is anymore. Just how easy it is to accomplish this was demonstrated at the RSA security conference a few months ago, by a team led by McAfee's former CTO.

When security problems are caused by software claiming to be something it's not, the solutions usually involve authentication - the implementation of some type of trust system. (Just the word "trust" sends up red flags among veteran IT workers.) In any chain of trust in a computer network, there must be some unimpeachable root that is capable of vouching for the authenticity of everything else. Operating systems are typically vulnerable, and thus serve as poor roots of trust. Engineers prefer the root to be inside the computer hardware, at a more tamper-proof level. Installing trust in any deep level has rarely been without controversy, mainly on the part of users who have learned from experience that, given the choice, both hardware and software vendors tend to trust themselves above a competitor.

The concept of building a root of trust in the BIOS traces back to 1998, with Intel's Extensible Firmware Interface created for its Itanium processor-based servers. The idea there was to build a more programmable shell that could effectively manage the system's transition between powering on and readying the main bus and peripherals, to launching the OS. When regulatory agencies' scrutiny of Intel began to intensify, Intel turned over EFI to an industry consortium including AMD Microsoft, and embedded processor maker ARM.

From the very beginning, the UEFI group had stated its intention to load operating systems other than Windows. And the first successful field implementation of secure booting with UEFI in consumer-grade equipment was in the first Intel-based Macs. UEFI is already a reality in PCs sold today, and especially in motherboards sold to enthusiasts and system builders (like me). So the issue isn't that Windows 7 doesn't already "support UEFI," or that UEFI by definition locks out Linux. The tools for Linux makers to adopt UEFI protocols are available openly today. So it's wrong to say UEFI is technically incompatible with Linux. Instead, there's a kind of "social gap" that the commercial vendors are not willing to help fill.

The Decision

The real question, of course, is does the UEFI flexibility tradeoff affect you? Specifically, does the disablement of your ability to have a dual- or multi-boot system that includes Windows 8 and one or more operating systems that do not support UEFI, impact your ability to work or use your computer the way you want?

If you are a part-time Linux user and part-time Windows 7 user, the answer may be "yes." You may not want to upgrade to Windows 8 until you know for certain you can dual- or multi-boot to your preferred flavor of Linux as well as Windows 8.
If you use Linux occasionally, perhaps for testing, then you might consider running Linux from a virtual machine instead of creating a dual-boot system. If you're testing Linux hardware reliability, though, a virtual implementation probably isn't a good solution for you. If you're just interested in the software or in the development tools available with Linux that have no counterpart in Windows yet, you may be perfectly comfortable running Linux from Oracle VirtualBox in Windows 8.
If you use Windows XP, and you want to upgrade to a modern PC but keep your XP-based hard drive, the UEFI lockdown could affect your ability to work with XP. You'll be better off keeping your XP drive where it is, and running it from there.

For everyone else, though, UEFI brings an enormous benefit: the confidence that a rootkit will not be able to substantively change the kernel of the operating system, with the aim of enabling malicious software. In my opinion, for most users, the benefits far outweigh the tradeoffs.

Of course, I said that about UAC in Vista too, and I found my point of view caricatured in a legendary Apple ad campaign.

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.: Four short links: 16 May 2012

Nat Torkington — 2012-05-16T10:00:00+00:00

Many Old Periodicals -- I'm working my way through the back issues of "Thrilling Love". Sample story, Moonmist for Mary by Dorothy Daniels, from Feb 1950. Filing clerk Mary wins the heart of her secret coworker romance AND closes the sale AND is promised stock. It's torn from the pages of real life, I tell ya!
Please Don't Learn to Code (Jeff Atwood) -- my take: everyone who is a "knowledge worker" should learn to program (who of us has not seen people wasting time with something we could automate in 10 lines of code?). It's hard to justify an adult like Bloomberg to take the time to learn to code, because he's already powerful and can hire other people to code. For this reason, I think kids should routinely be taught computational thinking (decomposition, pattern matching, etc.) and programming as a useful application of these skills. (via Jim Stogdill)
Fungible News -- Here’s my hypothesis. Educated people over forty have come to assume that journalism, whether on television, radio, print or the web, is the most convenient way to get answers to questions like what’s on the television, what’s going on in my neighborhood, who got elected, who is making a mess of things, any new music I should hear? [...] The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against. (via Phil Lindsay)
FF-Chartwell, a Graph-Making Font -- brilliant! Font uses ligatures to show graphs. This is an elegant hack in so many ways, for example: copy and paste and you get the bare numbers! (via Chris Spurgeon)

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from bbccouk] Video reveal: BBC super-sizing "the first truly digital Olympics"

2012-05-16T09:49:27+00:00

From paidContent

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from bbccouk] Interview: BBC’s Olympics will deliver an ‘online legacy’

2012-05-16T09:26:50+00:00

From paidContent

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from bbccouk] BBC announces Olympics coverage plans for tablets, smartphones, connected tv and online

2012-05-16T09:24:34+00:00

From Pocket Lint

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from bbccouk] BBC Sports Application Coming To PlayStation 3!

2012-05-16T09:22:43+00:00

From PlayStation blog

Slashdot: The Mathematics of Obesity

2012-05-16T09:14:00+00:00

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Carson C. Chow, an MIT-trained mathematician and physicist, has taken a new look at America's obesity epidemic and found that a food glut is behind America's weight problem, with the national obesity rate jumping from 20 percent to over 30 percent since 1970. 'Beginning in the 1970s, there was a change in national agricultural policy. Instead of the government paying farmers not to engage in full production, as was the practice, they were encouraged to grow as much food as they could,' says Chow. 'With such a huge food supply, food marketing got better and restaurants got cheaper. The low cost of food fueled the growth of the fast-food industry. If food were expensive, you couldn't have fast food.' Chow and mathematical physiologist Kevin Hall created a mathematical model of a human with hundreds of equations, boiled it down to one simple equation, and then plugged in all the variables — height, weight, food intake, exercise. The slimmed-down equation proved to be a useful platform for answering a host of questions. For example, huge variations in your daily food intake will not cause variations in weight, as long as your average food intake over a year is about the same. Unfortunately, another finding is that weight change, up or down, takes a very, very long time. Chow has posted an interactive version of the model on the web where people can plug in their information and learn how much they'll need to reduce their intake and increase their activity to lose."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Planet RDF: Interview: BBC on Publishing and Linked Data

2012-05-16T08:24:00+00:00

I chatted recently with Olivier Thereaux, Yves Raimond (senior technologist in R&D), and Silver Oliver (data architect) of the BBC about the Web, publishing, and linked data.

Ian: The BBC is prolific and large. How do you view yourselves?

Silver: The BBC is primarily a broadcasting organization. Content is developed or commissioned within different editorial domains (such as News or Music or Sports) then distributed through diverse channels (TV, Radio, web, apps, etc). This fragmentation exists also on the web, with development of individual sites being largely delegated to dedicated teams.

Ian: How do you move beyond silos?

Yves: We have a lot of data that we are now using to draw connections among various BBC TV and radio programs and entities in other domains, like music or nature. We also expose the corresponding data. For example the programmes site exposes data views giving details about all the music tracks played in a given radio programme, and those details link to (and draw from) artist profiles on the BBC's music site… which themselves are also available as data views.

Olivier: We also reuse data that's available on the Web (e.g., from musicbrainz and wikipedia). Because the public is curating the information they can update it more rapidly than we could on our own. In a way, the Web is our Content Management System.

Ian: What are you using to aggregate and expose the data?

Yves: For the programmes and music site we use a relational database internally but then we expose the information in RDF.

Olivier: And we benefit from the ways that people have innovated around the RDF data we expose. When people play with the interfaces and massage the data, we can build on their experience.

Ian: Why not use RDF internally?

Yves: I think the main reason is that the people who originally built these sites site were unaware of RDF, or were concerned about using an unfamiliar technology on such a big project. But we use it with other projects.

Ian: How has your uses of data affected reporting?

Silver: In the past our editorial efforts have been captured in whole HTML documents. This causes problems for reuse in new data views and across platforms and applications (including IPTV). The key is in working with existing editorial workflows to capture a sub-set of machine readable information. In its simplest form this might be a byline and small number of tags the story is about.

Ian: How do reporters use the data to make connections between stories?

Silver: Connections have always happened, but it didn't scale. Linking between sports and news was a manual process and reliant on a journalist's knowledge of BBC output. But now we have rich data models behind the scenes. These models help the BBC editorial staff represent their understanding of the world and our audience's interests, and let us make connections in a scalable fashion.

Olivier: The data is a substrate that pre-populates a lot of the site, and then journalists can focus on the stories and not re-entering the data bits.

Silver: In sport, for example, we pay for the sport data (fixtures, results and statistics) then we write stories about match reports, and tagging ensures that everything gets linked properly. That's how we built the sites for the 2010 world cup or the 2012 olympics.

Ian: Do the reporters add data to the system directly?

Silver: Yes, we ask them to tag the stories they pull together so that we can put those stories into different contexts (or aggregations). We were quite happy to realize the natural curatorial process was already happening, we just needed to give people a way to capture data.

Ian: You mentioned buying and using data from various sources, including commercial ones. Do you make use of data provenance information?

Yves: We need to be very transparent about where our data comes from. Our reporters, partners, official organisations, sometimes our audience too.

Olivier: There is an interesting tension between making use of provenance information and ensuring user privacy. These days people expect to receive personalized content. To achieve that we make use of "attention data": what you watch or like. We have been looking at how to guarantee that we uphold privacy while at the same time asking for the minimal amount of information to tailor the best experience. That's probably less about "Do Not Track" and closer to the spirit of W3C's older P3P technology. On the other hand, we want to know whether information is reliable. This is challenging for user-generated content in particular: who is the user? how much do we trust them?

Ian: Do you think making provenance information available to readers can help digital literacy?

Silver: We had an interesting debate internally whether to include links from health stories to the journals that published the original research. Some felt that readers would not be interested in the links or would find the research complex. Others encouraged the links so that the community could respond to our articles with their own interpretations, including challenging the articles from various angles. This, in turn, would generate more discussion and perspectives from a much larger audience.

Ian: How did it turn out?

Silver: In stories about politics we have begun to include links to relevant legislation. And we are exploring how to extend the linking to pull in data from these sources to weave into BBC story-telling. For example data about committees that commented on bills, which members of parliament commented, and so on. These data models allow us to make more connections among stories, as we discussed earlier.

Ian: This sounds like a linked data project!

Silver: Internally we have wholesale signed up for and understood the value of linked data as way to manage our organizational complexity. We will draw data from various sources and use RDF to stitch them together. We can make use of the information in ways we could not do before because it was either too costly or unmanageable. Semantic Web technology is now core to our strategy as an enterprise.

Ian: Have you measured cost savings by using Semantic Web technology?

Silver: It's still too early to say. There were costs associated with our initial projects, since we needed to acquire expertise. But we have since been able to roll out highly trafficked BBC content using Semantic Web technology.

Ian: Thank you all so much for your time!

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from klamma] SCA 2012

2012-05-16T08:15:02+00:00

Penny Arcade: Comic: Betwixt

Tycho — 2012-05-16T07:01:13+00:00

New Comic: Betwixt

Penny Arcade: News Post: Betwixt

Tycho — 2012-05-16T07:01:11+00:00

Tycho: This was a goofy joke when we wrote it at eleven or so yesterday morning, though it became less hilarious as the day progressed. During “normal hours,” the failure of Blizzard to recall that Diablo is a popular game was a boon: I have my own shit to write. But later, when I began to prowl for leisure activities, and it occurred to me that I might utilize the sixty dollars of congealed entertainment I had recently purchased, I was not able to. And then I was, and then I wasn’t, and then no wait it’s still okay now it’s

Slashdot: Big Media and Big Telcos Getting Nasty In Landmark Australian Law Case

2012-05-16T06:21:00+00:00

Fluffeh writes "In Australia, we have the right to record TV and play it back at a later date; we also have the right to transcode from one format to another, so anyone with a media server can legally back up their entire DVD collection and watch it without all those annoying warnings and unskippable content — as long as we don't break encryption (please stop laughing!). Optus, Australia's second largest Telco, has been raising ire though with the new TV Now service they are offering and Big Media is having a hissy fit. The service does the recording on behalf of the customer. Seems like a no-brainer right? Let the customer do what they are allowed to legally do at home, but charge them for it. Everybody wins! Not according to Sports Broadcasters, who made this statement when Optus said they would appeal their recent loss in an Australian Court to the highest court in the land: 'They are a disgusting organization who is acting reprehensibly again and now putting more uncertainty into sports and broadcast rights going forward I'm really disappointed and disgusted in the comments of their CEO overnight.' Is this yet another case of Big Media clutching at an outdated business model, or should consumers be content with just doing their own work?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Paralyzed Man Regains Hand Function After Breakthrough Nerve Rewiring Procedure

2012-05-16T04:19:00+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "A 71-year-old man who became paralyzed from the waist down and lost all use of both hands in a 2008 car accident has regained motor function in his fingers after doctors rewired his nerves to bypass the damaged ones in a pioneering surgical procedure, according to a case study published on Tuesday."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Giving iPad PowerPoint Presentations Just Got a Lot Better

2012-05-16T04:01:00+00:00

One of the iPad's more intriguing business uses is making presentations before a live audience. The device is portable and fun to use, and the swipe and pinch gestures can make for some dramatic presentations. Sadly, iPad presentations haven't lived up to their potential - especially for users of Microsoft PowerPoint. But the lastest version of Brainshark's free SlideShark app could help change that.

Normally, the latest version of a mobile app wouldn't merit coverate on ReadWriteWeb, but this is a game changer, especially for experienced speakers who are used to running their PowerPoint presentations with "presenter" mode. This is the ability to see your speaker notes and adjoining slides on the computer monitor at the podium, while the audience sees only a separate screen with the slide content. It is how I usually like to give my own speeches.

iPad Presentation Problems

There are several issues with giving a speech using an iPad. First is the actual connection to a digital projector. There are two methods you can use: either a wired connection with a special VGA or DVI dongle that fits to the bottom of the iPad, or with a wireless AirPlay connection to an Apple TV device. If you go wired, you better make sure your iPad is fully charged iPad, because you can't connect it to a power source while you have the dongle in place. Using an Apple TV means you have to cart around yet another device and get it set up properly. Neither is very satisfying.

A second issue is that Microsoft doesn't yet make an iPad version of PowerPoint, although Apple has an iOS version of Keynote. If you're a PowerPoint power user, there are a number of products that can display iPad presentations. VMware's Sliderocket is another free iPad presentation app. Or you could use the offline iPad app from Prezi.

Of course, you could junk the whole Powerpoint-style presentation ethos and move into a new era: this is what Alfresco is trying to do with its occupymeeting.com ebook manifesto here, along with a collection of tools for those that are interested. But many business people have years of deep experience with PowerPoint presentations and may not be quite ready to give up their slide decks. Many companies still prefer them, as well.

The Power of Presenter Mode

Most of these iPad presentation apps don't support presenter mode, and just show everyone whatever you have on your iPad screen. That can be limiting for speakers used to seeing their notes and their current position in the entire presentation. That's where SlideShark shines. iPad 2 and 3 users can plug into a projector or TV to simultaneously view slide notes, view separate timers for time spent on individual slides and the overall presentation on their mobile device - while the audience sees only the slides. There is also an animation counter. Of course, speakers can also choose a full-screen mode for both the presenter and the audience. In either mode, animations display on both screens. You can see a sample screenshot below.

Brainshark's newest SlideShark isn't going push the world of presentions in some brand new direction. Instead, it finally makes it possible to comfortably give an iPad PowerPoint presentation using the tools and views experienced presenters already count on. SlideShark version 1.6 is available today for a free download here from the iTunes App Store.

xkcd.com: Felidae

2012-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

Slashdot: DDR4 May Replace Mobile Memory For Less

2012-05-16T02:15:00+00:00

Lucas123 writes "The upcoming shift from Double Data Rate 3 (DDR3) RAM to its successor, DDR4, will herald a significant boost in both memory performance and capacity for data center hardware and consumer products alike. Because of the greater density, 2X performance and lower cost, the upcoming specification and products will for the first time mean DDR may be used in mobile devices instead of LPDDR. Today, mobile devices use low-power DDR (LPDDR) memory, the current iteration of which uses 1.2v of power. While the next generation of mobile memory, LPDDR3, will further reduce that power consumption (probably by 35% to 40%), it will also likely cost 40% more than DDR4 memory."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

cs.IR updates on arXiv.org: A Comparative Study of Collaborative Filtering Algorithms. (arXiv:1205.3193v1 [cs.IR])

2012-05-16T01:19:12+00:00

Collaborative filtering is a rapidly advancing research area. Every year several new techniques are proposed and yet it is not clear which of the techniques work best and under what conditions. In this paper we conduct a study comparing several collaborative filtering techniques -- both classic and recent state-of-the-art -- in a variety of experimental contexts. Specifically, we report conclusions controlling for number of items, number of users, sparsity level, performance criteria, and computational complexity. Our conclusions identify what algorithms work well and in what conditions, and contribute to both industrial deployment collaborative filtering algorithms and to the research community.

cs.IR updates on arXiv.org: Multi-Level Error-Resilient Neural Networks with Learning. (arXiv:1202.2770v2 [cs.NE] UPDATED)

2012-05-16T01:19:12+00:00

The problem of neural network association is to retrieve a previously memorized pattern from its noisy version using a network of neurons. An ideal neural network should include three components simultaneously: a learning algorithm, a large pattern retrieval capacity and resilience against noise. Prior works in this area usually improve one or two aspects at the cost of the third.

Our work takes a step forward in closing this gap. More specifically, we show that by forcing natural constraints on the set of learning patterns, we can drastically improve the retrieval capacity of our neural network. Moreover, we devise a learning algorithm whose role is to learn those patterns satisfying the above mentioned constraints. Finally we show that our neural network can cope with a fair amount of noise.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: The robustness of interdependent clustered networks. (arXiv:1205.3188v1 [physics.soc-ph])

2012-05-16T01:19:09+00:00

A system of interdependent networks was recently found to be very vulnerable since cascading failures that may lead to abrupt breakdown of the system. We develop an analytical method, based on the percolation method developed for single networks [M.E.J. Newman, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 103}, 058701 (2009)], to study the effect of clustering within the networks on the robustness of the interdependent networks. We find that, in contrast to single networks where the percolation threshold, $p_c$, does not change with clustering for site percolation and {\it decreases} with clustering for bond percolation, $p_c$ for interdependent networks {\it increases} when networks are more clustered.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: SportSense: Real-Time Detection of NFL Game Events from Twitter. (arXiv:1205.3212v1 [cs.SI])

2012-05-16T01:19:09+00:00

We report our experience in building a working system, SportSense (this http URL), which exploits Twitter users as human sensors of the physical world to detect events in real-time. Using the US National Football League (NFL) games as a case study, we report in-depth measurement studies of the delay and post rate of tweets, and their dependence on other properties. We subsequently develop a novel event detection method based on these findings, and demonstrate that it can effectively and accurately extract game events using open access Twitter data. SportSense has been evolving during the 2010-11 and 2011-12 NFL seasons and is able to recognize NFL game big plays in 30 to 90 seconds with 98% true positive, and 9% false positive rates. Using a smart electronic TV program guide, we show that SportSense can utilize human sensors to empower novel services.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: Critical paths in a metapopulation model of H1N1: Efficiently delaying influenza spreading through flight cancellation. (arXiv:1205.3245v1 [physics.soc-ph])

2012-05-16T01:19:09+00:00

Disease spreading through human travel networks has been a topic of great interest in recent years, as witnessed during outbreaks of influenza A (H1N1) or SARS pandemics. One way to stop spreading over the airline network are travel restrictions for major airports or network hubs based on the total number of passengers of an airport. Here, we test alternative strategies using edge removal, cancelling targeted flight connections rather than restricting traffic for network hubs, for controlling spreading over the airline network. We employ a SEIR metapopulation model that takes into account the population of cities, simulates infection within cities and across the network of the top 500 airports, and tests different flight cancellation methods for limiting the course of infection. The time required to spread an infection globally, as simulated by a stochastic global spreading model was used to rank the candidate control strategies. The model includes both local spreading dynamics at the level of populations and long-range connectivity obtained from real global airline travel data. Simulated spreading in this network showed that spreading infected 37% less individuals after cancelling a quarter of flight connections between cities, as selected by betweenness centrality. The alternative strategy of closing down whole airports causing the same number of cancelled connections only reduced infections by 18%. In conclusion, selecting highly ranked single connections between cities for cancellation was more effective, resulting in fewer individuals infected with influenza, compared to shutting down whole airports. It is also a more efficient strategy, affecting fewer passengers while producing the same reduction in infections.

The network of connections between the top 500 airports is available under the resources link on our website this http URL

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: Probing into the effectiveness of self-isolation policies in epidemic control. (arXiv:1205.3337v1 [q-bio.PE])

2012-05-16T01:19:09+00:00

In this work, we inspect the reliability of controlling and quelling an epidemic disease mimicked by a Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model defined on a complex network by means of current and implementable quarantine and isolation policies. Specifically, we consider that each individual in the network is originally linked to two types of individuals: members of the same household and acquaintances. The topology of this network evolves taking into account a probability $q$ that aims at representing the quarantine or isolation process in which the connection with acquaintances is disrupted according to standard policies of control of epidemics. Within current policies of self-isolation and standard infection rates, our results show that the propagation is either only controllable for hypothetical rates of compliance or uncontrollable at all.