August 2008
15 posts
A Limerick
From my Hack Day application:
There once was a function called Learn(),
knowledge and skill it returned,
But put in a class called FailorPass,
And the program quickly adjurned.
“Our industry is aware of the scalability challenges of globally linked data, but...”
– Peter Sweeney on the Primal Fusion Blog
Watch
How to Risk the Identities of Dozens of Thousands...
Highly sensitive information about dozens of thousands of students was available at a public web address on Princeton Review servers for seven weeks, according to the New York Times.
As reporter Brad Stone notes,
One file on the site contained information on about 34,000
students in the public schools in Sarasota, Fla., where the
Princeton Review was hired to build an online tool to help...
Revisiting Plagarism
Lots of talk about education, or rather, the lack thereof.
Higher education sucks.
International education sucks.
There’s a lot of problems with the culture and process of education, and there will have to be many solutions, both of the very focused and very grandiose variety.
But I’m pretty bothered that in this era of edupunk, we’re still ignoring a blatantly obvious...
Watch
The Problem with Parallax...and Freebase
Earlier this week, David François Huynh unveiled Parallax, a new search front-end for Freebase.
I tried out the site, and was initially impressed by the ability to quickly generate charts and maps. “Ooh, neat.”
And then I promptly left.
I wasn’t the only one to have this reaction, it seems. A couple days later, Read Write Web’s Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote up a piece...
Future, Present, Past
via Good
WHO IS EXCITED ABOUT JOHN MCCAIN? →
Answer: Not these guys. (Tip o’ the hat to John Aravosis)
The Engineer and the Polar Bear
Yes, Earth aka Polar Bear Swimming Pool is wreaking havoc on the ecosystems, according to the BBC’s beautiful new Earth film.
I posted about it on Hacker News. Ever since watching it, I’ve felt like there’s so much around me that is far too complex for my puny engineering efforts to even compete.
My favorite response was from Daniel L:
The fact that I've been going back to...
Watch and See: Schools on Facebook Next Year
Inigral previews Schools on Facebook
I haven’t seen any of the Inigral guys in a while, but if I did I would probably tell them that I sent this screencast to a grad school engineer friend, and to my high school English teacher.
The engineer friend didn’t get it. “Anyone could code this. What’s the big deal?”
My 72-year old teacher, on the other hand, was...
WatchDropping things on friends.
LazyWeb: Name Verification Should Suck Less
Has Mountain View really lost its Mojo? Is Knol just “spam”, as Doc and Danah (and many others) think?
Tough call. One thing that makes Google Knol sorta interesting is name verification for content creators.
It’s never been done right, on a large scale.
Unfortunately, Google has earned the failwhale on its implementation.
If you’re not in the United States,...