The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete (8)
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Chris Anderson (140)
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Wired Top Stories (1210)
1 week, 5 days
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"All models are wrong, but some are useful." So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they ...
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Rakesh said:
Isnt it more like a new heretofore impossible methodology?
Thirteen words that lose their meaning when the denominator approaches infinity (27)
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Chris Anderson (140)
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The Long Tail (126)
1 month
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When you think about it, a lot of the English language is really about ratios within a finite set. So you can say "most Americans" and that's meaningful, because the number of Americans is approximately known and relatively static. Likewise for "few" or "many"--these words are implicitly ratios, and they assume some common agreement on what the denominator is. The world we grew up in was full of bounded sets--relatively well known and static populations ...
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Ben said:
How are you supposed to demonstrate any sort of rule or law if you cannot use grouping words? Saying "my cat is black" tells you nothing, other cats can be owned and black.
Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight (video) (21)
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Joop Dorresteijn (0)
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The Next Web (98)
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Established blogs like ReadWriteWeb and Techcrunch proudly show a Feedburner chicklet that displays the sites popularity. But beware – since people are more likely to subscribe to a site with a bigger amount of readers, some sites manipulate the counter. Every once and a while co-editor Patrick and I stumble on a shady looking website with a ton of readers. That made us wonder whether Feedburner is hackable. I’ve sacrificed my personal blog for a ...
Socialmedian Opens Up Combining Many of the Best Ideas in Social News (14)
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Adam Ostrow (376)
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Mashable! (2991)
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Socialmedian, a social news site that we’ve tracked the progress of over the past few months, is now open to everyone. While a lot of the bases have been covered in our previous coverage, give Socialmedian credit for a nicely paced launch and responsiveness to its alpha users. Today’s public launch includes 350 “user-generated features” as founder Jason Goldberg likes to call them, and the site already has more than 1,000 daily active users – ...
Apple restores partial access to MobileMe e-mail (1)
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IDG News Service (2)
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Industry Standard News and Predictions (8)
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Apple Inc. late Friday announced that it had restored partial access to blacked-out MobileMe e-mail accounts, but acknowledged that some messages sent to those accounts had been lost during the week-long outage. Full access to MobileMe's e-mail will be restored within another week, Apple said. In a posting under a new "Status" section of the MobileMe home page on Apple's Web site, an unnamed employee said he had been directed by CEO Steve Jobs to ...
Google Debuts Rival for Wikipedia, Written by Experts (25)
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Steven Levy (93)
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Wired Top Stories (1210)
1 month, 2 weeks
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Udi Manber loves cartoons. Not animations, but the single-panel graphics that appear in magazines like The New Yorker. He studies the history of the field, has covered the walls of his house with framed originals, and has edited a book of cartoons about Google, where he works as the head of search engineering. "Udi's not just a fan, he's a connoisseur," says Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker. When not thinking about cartoons, ...
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Daemach said:
Interesting idea.
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Wojciech Beling said:
To się nazywa team! A jakie warunki pracy! Ja też chcę 3 monitory!!!
Google Throws Open Rival for Wikipedia — Anon Authors Discouraged (1)
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Steven Levy (93)
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Wired Top Stories (1210)
1 month, 2 weeks
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Google announced on its official blog Wednesday the debut of Knol, a Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia penned by authoritative sources. Udi Manber loves cartoons. Not animations, but the single-panel graphics that appear in magazines like The New Yorker. He studies the history of the field, has covered the walls of his house with framed originals, and has edited a book of cartoons about Google, where he works as the head of search engineering. "Udi's not just ...
The Vista disaster back story (38)
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Bernard Lunn (101)
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ReadWriteWeb (3379)
1 month, 3 weeks
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Microsoft's failure to close the Yahoo deal, despite all kinds of loud talk and machinations, makes the Beast of Redmond look increasingly weaker. They may still pull it off, but even then the question is why do they need Yahoo so badly? The answer is that their dramatic failure with Vista took away their normal playbook. It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the Vista disaster. It is even worse than ME and that ...
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Nick Main said:
Vista has some cool stuff under the hood. But that's like saying telling people your car has a revolutionary new carburetor when the engine keeps stalling and the back wheel just fell off.
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Hassan said:
"Vista has some cool stuff under the hood. But that's like saying telling people your car has a revolutionary new carburetor when the engine keeps stalling and the back wheel just fell off." .. LOL
ReadWriteWeb Integrates FriendFeed Into Our Comments (10)
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Richard MacManus (517)
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ReadWriteWeb (3379)
1 month, 3 weeks
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2008 has seen a big change in the way the blogging community communicates with each other. In a nutshell, discussions have become very fragmented. There are two main reasons for this: firstly Twitter and its 140 character soundbites has become very popular among bloggers, and secondly FriendFeed has tipped as the lifestreaming aggregator of choice for many people. The upshot is that there are now many places where people can have online discussions. This has ...
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Michael said:
This may be the first use of FriendFeed that I actually find interesting...comment aggregation instead of splintering.
Microbial energy solution prospects for biofuels and solar power (2)
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bw (34)
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Next Big Future (32)
1 month, 3 weeks
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The microbial energy solution for biofuels and solar power The Biodesign team, in their Nature Review Microbiology perspective article, outlines the prospects for bioenergy. They believe the future of microbial bioenergy is brightened by recent advancements in genome technologies and other molecular-biology techniques. One species of bacteria, the human gut bacterium E. coli, has become the workhorse of the multi-trillion dollar global biotech industry.Microorganisms can produce renewable energy in large quantities and without damaging the ...
Boeing's Blimp-Copter (4)
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Sharon Weinberger (4)
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Danger Room (50)
1 month, 3 weeks
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Boeing has teamed with a Canadian company to enter the blimp market with a combined airship-helicopter. Working with SkyHook International, Boeing says its JHL-40 could take some 80,000 pounds of cargo over 200 miles. "Boeing said the blimp would be environmentally friendly because it would eliminate the need to build roads or rail lines to remote locations, where transportation can be costly, inadequate and unreliable," Reuters reports. "The JHL-40, or Jess Heavy Lifter, is named ...
Metaweb's Freebase Now 60% Larger Than English Wikipedia (10)
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Marshall Kirkpatrick (888)
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ReadWriteWeb (3379)
2 months
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Wikipedia is an incredible monument to human creativity and collaboration, but as one era of innovation passes into another - semantic web advocates want to augment the huge human input into the web with machine learning. The semantically enriched common database Freebase announced today that it will soon reach the milestone of 4 million topics added to its collection. That's 60% more than English Wikipedia's 2,445,041 articles and almost half the size of Wikipedia's full ...
Sunglasses that Hide your Face from Cameras (4)
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schneier (199)
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Schneier on Security (234)
2 months
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Clever. Article and video: They work by mounting two small infrared lights on the front. The wearer is completely inconspicuous to the human eye, but cameras only see a big white blur where your face should be. Building them is a snap: just take a pair of sunglasses, attach two small but powerful IR LEDS to two pairs of wires, one wire per LED. Then attach the LEDs to the glasses; the video suggests making ...
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Richard said:
Awesome. Via Isaac Hepworth
Which Video Categories Dominate? (1)
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David (378)
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TubeMogul Blog (2)
2 months
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We had this unused chart left over from our previous study, in which we took a sample of 10,000 videos deployed by TubeMogul that at least achieved 1,000 views in the first 90 days and looked at viewership over time. Here are the same 10,000 uploads, broken down by video category: No doubt our users will have insights, but a few categories stuck out (or at least to me): 8% for “Science & Technology?” Wow. ...
Lester Brown Plan B is mathematically and logistically flawed (1)
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bw (34)
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Next Big Future (32)
2 months
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Lester Brown is pushing an Earth Policy Institute plan for replacing all coal, oil and most natural gas by 2020 Their calculations for energy are flawed. It appears that they ignore capacity factor. They also do not look at pricing or consider the build up of factories and supply chain. Although I guess some of that comes from an assumption of taking over (mobilizing) existing automotive factories and converting them to building wind turbines.Plan B ...
The Interactive Linux Kernel Map (2)
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timothy (512)
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Slashdot (2469)
2 months, 1 week
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Constantine writes "The Linux kernel is one of most complex open source projects. Even though there are a lot of books on the Linux kernel, it is still a difficult subject to comprehend. The interactive Linux kernel map gives you a top-down view of the kernel. You can see the most important layers, functionalities, modules, functions, and calls. Each function on the map is a link to its source code. The map is interactive. You ...
Where to run the One Machine? (4)
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Chris Anderson (140)
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The Long Tail (126)
2 months, 1 week
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In the new issue of Wired, Kevin Kelly has written another one of his patented mind grenades: the observation that the Internet has now hit approximate computational equivalence to a single human brain: A hyperlink is much like a synapse in the brain. Both work by making associations between nodes. Each unit of thinking in the brain — an idea, for example — grows by gaining links to other thoughts. The greater the number of ...
Inventor of the Internet takes aim at BitTorrent (1)
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Rafe Needleman (181)
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Webware.com (757)
2 months, 1 week
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In the 1960s, Lawrence Roberts invented computer networking via data packets, which led directly to the development of ARPANet and the Internet . And now Roberts is trying to fix one of the Internet's biggest problems: network overload caused by peer-to-peer file transfers. Not Al Gore.(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET) At Structure 08, he laid out the problem: 5 percent of the Net's users are running P2P transfers taking up 80 percent of its capacity, ...
