O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | yesterday
Data and communications are critical contributors to health care. I recently attended an event covering efforts in my state to promote Electronic Health Records, and what we can do to move faster.
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | yesterday
A children’s toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips -- microfluidic chips (with tiny liquid-filled channels) can cost $100k and more. Michelle Khine used the Shrinky Dinks childrens' toy to make her own. "I thought if I could print out the [designs] at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels...
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
The gaming industry tends to focus on the high end products, first person shooters that crank out a bazillion polygons a seconds and RPGs with spend more time developing the plot in cut scenes than in actual gameplay. But for every person playing Borderlands, there are scores playing casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma. PopCap Games has been at the forefront of casual game development, with a catalog...
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
A Battery-Free Implantable Neural Sensor (MIT Tech Review) -- Electrical engineers at the University of Washington have developed an implantable neural sensing chip that needs less power. Uses RFID's induction technology which means the power source can be up to a meter away. Proof of concept was implanted in a moth to sense central nervous system activity. New Microsoft...
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
While the first reaction to a government announcement "Synopsis for Public Data Dissemination Sole Source Contract to Google, Inc." might be one of horror, this is actually part of an effort by an unlikely coalition to solve a problem government hasn't figured out how to solve itself.
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control. Social technologies are cloaked in a rhetoric of liberation (customers are in control, the internet fosters democracy, social technologies propagate truth etc.) that tend to obscure the fact that never before have we handed so much personal information over in exchange for so little in...
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Red Laser -- "impossibly accurate barcode scanning". Uses Google Product Search to identify products that you scan using the camera on the phone. I remember Rael and I talking to Jeff Bezos about this years ago, before camphones had the resolution to decode barcodes. The future is here and it's $1.99 on the App Store ... (via Ed Corkery...
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller This gem from Whimsley makes the point - with extensive statistical modeling supporting the argument - that our algorithm-obsessed, long tail merchants are actually depleting the overall choice pool despite the fact that as individuals we may be experiencing a sense of more choice through...
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Heat Maps in R -- We used financial data here because it's easier to access than the airline data, but it's actually a pretty interesting way of looking at a financial time series. Weekend and holiday effects are a bit more obvious, and it's a bit like being able to see the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly closes all...
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Twitter Approval Matrix - October 2009
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
ChipHacker -- collaborative FAQ site for electronics hacking. Based on the same StackExchange software as RedMonk's FOSS FAQ for open source software. Democracy Live -- BBC launch searchable coverage of parliamentary discussion, using speech-to-text. One aspect we're particularly proud of is that we've managed to deliver good results for speech-to-text in Welsh, which, we're told, is unique. I think...
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
In the circles that I travel the Internet is often breathlessly embraced as the herald of all things good; the bringer of increased choice, personal empowerment, social harmony...and the list goes on. And yet, as with any powerful technology, the truth of its consequences eludes such a singular and happy narrative. Here are three paradoxes of the Internet Age. I...
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
Your Botnet is My Botnet (PDF) -- 2008 USENIX Security paper analysing >70G of data gathered when security researchers hijacked the Torpig botnet. A major limitation of analyzing a botnet from the inside is the limited view. Most current botnets use stripped-down IRC or HTTP servers as their command and control channels, and it is not possible to make...
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
Andrew Hyde runs Ignite Boulder and works for Techstars. In this week's episode he shares his thoughts at Ignite ATL about the rapid economic shifts that can be caused by user-generated content. Andrew calls this the Posting Economy. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License...
O'Reilly Radar (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
I use Twitter a lot, but I was not among the very first to see the new Lists feature. I can now, though. And what I find much more interesting than actually using the feature myself is the fact that I woke up this morning to find that I was on dozens of other people's lists. (In fact, while I...
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