September 2008
11 posts
How Would Google Grade?
On Friday, an article about Open Teaching was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, describing a future of decentralized, loosely coupled education:
Imagine the hosts of the TV show Myth Busters offering a course on the scientific method delivered via the Discovery Channel’s Web site. Or Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling Tipping Point, teaching an online business course on...
My Talk At the Freebase Developer Meeting
Starting with building Drupal plugins for the Daily my freshman year of college, I’ve been pretty big a fan of weekend side-projects.Of course, these projects always end after a weekend, or a few weeks at most. There have been plenty of small projects I’ve worked on that could have conceivably become startups, but my conclusion is always the same - this isn’t worth the commitment...
You Think Knol Sucks? I've Got the Perfect Knol...
I typically agree with Slate technology colunnist Fargad Manjoo about just about everything. True Enough resonated particularly with me. It seems at first to be just another book about culture wars and the decline of journalistic integrity, but it pushes the discussion farther than I’ve ever seen it go.
As Eric wrote in a July review of the book,
Manjoo observes that we, the body...
It's Called Bulshytt
From Anathem:
Bulshytt:
(1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation.
(2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such...
Watch
The Cloud And The College Application
Recently, I saw Charlie O’Donnell at a cafe in the Mission District and introduced myself. It wasn’t long before I was showing him a demo of what I’ve been working on. He listened attentively to my pitch, and gave me some useful advice. Among other things, he suggested I have another look at Previsor’s BrainBench product.
Today, I took a few BrainBench assessments....
Re-Blogging A Conversation with Sam
“It would also be interesting if premium video content was made
available free as long as users watch with product placements being
called out (like pop-up video from VH1, maybe). That way you could
watch a movie, or a ‘premium show’ like Entourage for free and the
distributor get something too…”
I think when product placement is called out, it ruins it. Isn’t...
hasthelargehadron colliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com
Even better than the site is the News YC comments:
“I wouldn’t count on it working in IE6.”
Django and News Organizations
I’m not a big fan of Politifact. I’m having some issues in general right now with Cartesian Epistemology, so I’m not very impressed by the “Truth-O-Meter” and its silly take on whether the Republican party fear-mongering is “half true”, “barely true”, or “pants on fire”.
Of course, using Django, Politifact must have only taken...
When the Web is Sort Of Correct, Pt. 1
This may become a regularish series about the “edge cases” where semantic search queries leave us with more questions than they do answers.
Powerset/Freebase Query: Where did Sarah Palin go to college?
Apparently, Palin attended five colleges in six years.
Update: Edited Palin’s Freebase topic. I’d like to see how long this change takes to get reflected on...
Why is only 1/25 of the United States interested...
Doing a little bit of market research this morning for a new project, and out of curiosity, I looked up “Y Combinator” in Google Search Insights.
Almost all searches for “Y Combinator” are from the United States, with a trickle from the U.K. That’s not so surprising, although I was taken aback by the concentrations of national search traffic:
Here’s a map...