One of our readers sent us this DoD photo of a Special Forces Soldier helo casting with his K9 during Exercise Emerald Warrior 11. While the reader thought that it was interesting that the Soldier was wearing Five Fingers, we were more interested in the K9′s Bass Pro Shops flotation vest.
Thanks Anatolii!
Christopher Poole, the founder of controversial online image board 4chan, outlined his vision for Web-based community today at the South by Southwest Interactive conference — and yes, his ideas are in pretty sharp contrast to those of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg has spent a lot of time talking about his stance on identity and privacy, especially recently, as Facebook has taken more criticism for its various privacy policies. (To get the flavor of his remarks, check out VentureBeat’s post about Zuckerberg’s privacy stance from last May, as well as David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect.) He’s been pretty aggressive about advocating for users to have one identity wherever they are online, because that encourages them to be more authentic (and also means they can carry their social connections with them to any site).
Poole, who is also known under his 4chan username “mootâ€, said, “I think that’s totally wrong.†He’s had plenty of opportunity to observe the pluses and minuses of anonymity in action, since 4chan is well-known for its anonymous user base. (In fact, the activist hacker group that emerged from 4chan is known as Anonymous.)
Poole argued that anonymity allows users to reveal themselves in a “completely unvarnished, unfiltered, raw way.†One of the things that’s lost when you carry the same identity everywhere is “the innocence of youth.†(“Innocence†isn’t the first word that would come to mind when I think of 4chan, but okay, I’ll go with him here.) In other words, when everyone knows everything you’ve done online, you’re a lot more worried about screwing up, and you’re less willing to experiment. Poole compared this to being a kid, moving to a new neighborhood, and having the opportunity to start over. On the Internet, you don’t get that opportunity.
“The cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself,†Poole said.
In the case of 4chan, users feel a lot more comfortable trying to create funny images that can become memes, because content that doesn’t catch on disappears quickly, and they’re not weighed down by their failures. Poole said another benefit to 4chan’s anonymity is that content becomes more important than the creator, which is unlike virtually any other online community. Rather than prioritizing the most valued and experienced users, 4chan allows anyone to access the site and post something that might take off.
At the same time, it seems Poole’s attitude towards privacy has evolved. He’s working on a new community site called Canv.as, which actually integrates with Facebook Connect, although users can still post anonymously. Poole said the fact that “you know that we know†the user’s real identity, even if other users can’t see it, discourages people from indulging in the most obnoxious behavior.
The “Wild West†approach, while important for 4chan’s popularity, has had an effect on Poole’s ability to turn the site into a real business. Very few brands are willing to run their ads alongside content that’s so unpredictable and potentially offensive, he acknowledged.
Companies: 4chan, Canv.as, Facebook
People: Christopher Poole, Mark Zuckerberg, moot
Web development and free and open source software (FOSS) have gone hand in hand since the beginning of the web. Popular scripting languages and web development frameworks such as PHP, Rails and Python are all open source, and many of the most popular platforms built on top of them, like WordPress and Drupal, are too.
Open source has leveled the playing field by reducing the costs of creating software and web services, as well as nurturing innovation and sharing in the web development community.
However, even though the languages and platforms are free — and infrastructure to host them on are getting cheaper and cheaper by the minute thanks to cloud services and affordable hosting solutions like virtual private servers — a booming economy has evolved around the development of products and services for use with open source software.
This economy includes a range of software and services from premium themes for popular open source platforms such as Drupal, Joomla and WordPress to the use of open source web development frameworks like jQuery and Ruby on Rails for creating subscription-based web applications.
Free and commercial open source are symbiotic and complement each other by allowing software products and services to emerge in the marketplace that would not have been possible without open source. Commercial extensions increase the versatility and competitive viability of open source products while also creating a self-sustaining economy.
Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are three of the top open source CMS platforms and are all built on PHP (also open source). Plenty more lesser-known content management systems exist, and are also viable platforms to build sites on.
WordPress is possibly the most popular one of the bunch. Like its counterparts, the core WordPress package is free and open source, but they also offer premium services to end-users. Drupal core is free and open source, but has premium products and services geared toward enterprises offered through the Acquia network. Selling premium products and services for open source projects is a common strategy for monetizing open source development, especially for such widely used systems.
Some open source products take a different approach by licensing the basic product as free and open source, and then selling premium versions and services of it under a commercial license. One example of this is MySQL, a popular relational database management system that offers a community edition (free) and several enterprise editions under a commercial license. Magento does the same for its open source e-commerce platform, and Alfresco for their enterprise CMS.
A smaller scale example of the free and commercial open source relationship is the creation of commercial plugins and modules for popular open source platforms such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Plugins and modules offer functionality outside of the scope of the core package, empowering end-users by making the systems more versatile while creating an incentive for professional web developers to create better solutions for the community of users.
Making money on open source web development has pros and cons. A very active debate on the programmers’ question and answer site, StackExchange, shows just how varied opinions are on the subject from a developer’s perspective.
By releasing extensions through an existing platform, developers are able to utilize the community’s forums and marketplaces to make their work available to thousands, if not millions, of users.
However, unless you have a marketing team and a solid distribution channel in place, it is an uphill struggle to gain visibility for your product.
Software marketplaces — a portal for selling digital goods — can give you the ability to put your work out there.
Below is a short list of software marketplaces. The list isn’t meant to be comprehensive (because there are a ton of open source marketplaces out there), but rather, it’s just to give you an idea of the viability of commercializing development for open source projects.
Google’s Chrome Web Store offers themes, extensions, and apps for users of the largely open source browser, Google Chrome.
The Android Market offers thousands of paid and free apps, all built on the open source Android mobile app platform.
WP Plugins is a niche software marketplace for WordPress plugins. They offer premium WordPress plugins for extending WordPress with features such as e-commerce capabilities.
The popular marketplace by Envato with over 600,000 members, ThemeForest is a place where you can find premium themes for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and many others.
This is a marketplace for source code for languages like PHP and JavaScript.
Joomla has its own extensions directory, some of which have commercial/premium versions.
This is a directory for Ruby on Rails plugins; the site currently lists over 1,600 plugins, and that number is growing.
Creating products and providing services for open source software is a viable way for web developers to diversify their income channels. If you have reusable code that you use in most of your projects, or have a good idea for a project that fulfills a need not answered by free solutions, then publishing a commercial alternative might give you some relief from the freelance project hunting cycle or that 9-to-5 day job. In many instances, developers can even make a living solely on products and services for free and open source software.
Rosston Meyer is a freelance web designer based out of Delray Beach, FL. He has collaborated on interesting projects over the years, including the Ocean Energy Council with family members and with Wizard Sleeve Toys on designer toy production and marketing efforts. You can find his work and social profiles at Rosstamicah New Media Design.
Right now, big data is restricted to 1.) the companies that can afford Oracle, and 2.) the companies that can leverage Hadoop and Cassandra, HBase or other NoSQL alternatives. These tools are robust and will always be necessary. They also take considerable amounts of time and knowledge to deploy.
Our mission at Infochimps is to democratize the world’s access to data. The best way to do this is to host useful data in one place so that people can share it. By collectively offsetting the hosting costs, a lot of people can access useful information without the pains of scraping and hosting it.
We have launched more data API calls on our website and intend to launch hundreds more in the next few weeks. Our data API allows you to query databases like our Twitter conversations database, which is over half a terabyte in size. This is not something you can comfortably do with MySQL, and we are giving you access to it for free. Using your Infochimps API key, you can access this data within seconds. I don’t even have MySQL installed on my computer and our data team has given me the power to find and understand data that only “big data†companies have the resources to access. It is truly inspiring.
Here are just a few of the types of data you can query with no prior knowledge of non-relational databases:
* Twitter People Search: Tired of poking around on Twitter forever just to find cool people to follow? Think of a subject you like and query this data set for it. It helps you find like-minded people on Twitter.
* The 100 million word British National Corpus: a representative sample of spoken and written British English in the late 20th century. This is incredibly useful for linguistics and language processing.
* Qwerly: Query a person’s social media handle and find all of their corresponding social media presences online. It helps you get a stronger sense of who a person is.
* IP to Demographic: Be smarter about the people who visit your website. Find the demographics of your visitors based on their IP addresses.
* Wikipedia Articles Abstract Search: Look up a term in Wikipedia and get general descriptions that contain that word. This helps people or machines instantly understand something.
We are still in beta with our new API calls, but you take a look at some of them yourself. We have bookmarked them with the tag “AwesomeAPIsâ€. They are here:
http://www.infochimps.com/awesomeapis
It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever written a MySQL query in your life. Find a data set you like and query it using our new API Explorer located on each data set that is accessible via our API. You’ll think it’s cool. We promise.
We are still in beta, so feel free to email me direct at michelle(at)infochimps.com should you have any questions or issues. Oh, and sign up for an API key. This will put you in the loop for when we launch more.
One of our readers just sent this in: British designer Patrick Smith (a.k.a. Graphic Patrick) made some pretty nice minimalist posters about mental disorders.
Apparently, Smith was doing some research about mental health when he came across a list of mental disorders and got inspired.
My personal pref goes out to Agoraphobia. Yours? (Thx, Stefano!)
A few months ago I had lunch with an old friend. As is often the case we were talking technology and, specifically, what new apps we were using. He was especially excited about the release of the Google Translate iPhone app.
After having our collective minds blown by the possibilites of the app, which translates speech or text across multiple languages, he made a remark that I haven’t been able to shake:
“Facebook would never make something like thisâ€.
I was reminded of his comment as I woke up to news of the devastating earthquake and tsunami which struck Japan overnight. Within moments of the tragedy, Google’s Crisis Response team jumped into action with technology that helps people find others or share information about people they’ve found via their Person Finder service. Their intent isn’t to serve up ads next to names in the search results, their intent is to use technology to organize information in a time its most needed.
Which is why I haven’t been able to shake his comment. It just seems so loaded with connotations about who Google and Facebook are as companies.Â
Its suggests that when Google is at its best they’re biting off huge technical challenges. Sometimes these huge challenges are clearly monetizable like Android, Google Maps or YouTube. And, sometimes, monetizing them isn’t so clear but they’re just too cool or useful not to do like the body browser, the art project or the self driving car, It also suggests that Google is at its worst when trying to keep up with, or copy, others they view as competitive like Facebook, Foursquare or Twitter where a huge technical challenge isn’t at the heart of those services’ success.
The other side of his assertion is that Facebook wouldn’t build something like Google Translate which suggests that Facebook at their best is not about technical challenges, but something else. Its easy to say that Facebook, at their best, is about solving big social challenges or organizing information on people. I do think Facebook at their best is when they act as an enabling platform and get out of their users way. Enabling companies to connect with their customers, enabling developers to build unique experiences for users on Facebook’s social graph or enabling citizens to organize and effect change. Facebook at its worst? Similar to Google. When they get lusty about data sets and application spaces they see other start ups winning in like Groups, Q&A, Location and Comments and disregard their role as a platform.
In the end, I don’t think we’ll see Facebook build something as cool or technically challenging as Google Translate. Its not who they are. And, if you’ve taken anything away from hanging out here at BRYCE DOT VC, its that the people and companies who stay true to who they are come out on top.
"the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad."Tragically, many obstetricians and the March of Dimes had vociferously supported this move, without understanding the basic economics of monopoly pricing. They thought that granting a monopoly to one company would mean that it would make the drug "more available." Joke's on them, and now they're upset:
"That's a huge increase for something that can't be costing them that much to make. For crying out loud, this is about making money," said Dr. Roger Snow, deputy medical director for Massachusetts' Medicaid program.It's really amazing that people don't understand the basics of monopoly pricing and how drastically it has distorted the market for drugs. Hopefully this story of Makena will get some people to wake up as to why this is a massive problem.
"I've never seen anything as outrageous as this," said Dr. Arnold Cohen, an obstetrician at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia.
"I'm breathless," said Dr. Joanne Armstrong, the head of women's health for Aetna, the Hartford-based national health insurer.
Doctors say the price hike may deter low-income women from getting the drug, leading to more premature births. And it will certainly be a huge financial burden for health insurance companies and government programs that have been paying for it.
There’s a 40 year-old nuclear reactor cooling-down right now in Japan following the big earthquake in that country. Actually there are 11 such reactors cooling-down, automatically brought offline by the 8.9 temblor, but one of those reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi generating plant is not going gracefully and 3000 people have been moved from their homes as a precaution.
Good idea.
I worked as an investigator for the Presidential Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, 32 years ago, and a few months studying the plumbing TMI’s Unit 2, which is actually younger than the errant Japanese reactor, gives me a very healthy respect for the danger in Japan.
That Japanese reactor shut down automatically within seconds of the earthquake, the idea being that dropping the thermal load (stopping the nuclear reaction and cooling-down the reactor) would minimize risk overall from a huge plumbing system that was likely compromised and vulnerable. Radiation and the passage of time conspire to make pipes brittle and aftershocks make brittle pipes break. Not good.
The 10 other reactors behaved as expected, but this unit didn’t. Once the reactor was no longer making steam to drive a turbine and generate electricity the plant was supposed to fire-up diesel generators to make the power needed to keep coolant pumps running. Only the diesels wouldn’t start. It can take up to seven days, you see, to get such a reactor down to where it can survive without circulating coolant. With the diesels out (under water perhaps?) the plant relied on batteries to run the pumps — batteries good for only eight hours.
Tokyo Electric Power Company isn’t saying much. Utilities tend not to and Japanese utilities are notoriously secretive. But we got a clue to what’s happening from U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, of all people, who remarked that the U. S. military was delivering “coolant†to the stricken reactor.
“Coolant?†wondered aloud all the CNN and Fox News nuclear experts looking for a lede for their stories. “What is she talking about, coolant?†This is a boiling water reactor and the coolant is water. The U. S. Air Force isn’t needed to export water to Japan.
This shows the limits of cable news experts and maybe experts in general, because Hillary isn’t the kind of person to choose the wrong words. She said “coolant†and she meant “coolant.†Though she may not have known she was saying so, she also meant the reactor was dead and will never be restarted.
A boiling water reactor does just what it sounds like — it boils water to make steam that drives a turbine generator. This is as opposed to a pressurized water reactor that uses the nuclear reaction to heat a coolant that never really boils because it is under high pressure, then sends that coolant through a heat exchanger which heats water to make steam to drive the generator. Boiling water reactors are simpler, cheaper, but generally aren’t made anymore because they are perceived as being less safe. That’s because the exotic coolant in the pressurized water reactor can contain boric acid which absorbs neutrons and can help (or totally) control the nuclear reaction. You can’t use boric acid or any other soluble boron-laced neutron absorbers in a boiling water reactor because doing so would contaminate both the cooling system and the environment.
That’s why the experts didn’t expect it because they are still thinking of how the plant can be saved, but it can’t be.
Though the boiling water reactor has already been turned off by inserting neutron-absorbing control rods all the way into the core, adding boric acid or, more likely, sodium polyborate would turn the reactor off-er — more off than off — which could come in really handy in the event of a subsequent coolant loss, which reportedly has already happened. But that’s a $1 billion kill switch that most experts wouldn’t think to pull.
I’m guessing the US Navy delivered a load of sodium polyborate from some nuclear aircraft carrier reactor supply room in the Pacific Fleet. Its use indicates that the nuclear threat is even worse than presently being portrayed in the news. Tokyo Electric Power Company has probably given-up any hope of keeping those cooling pumps on after the batteries fail. Eventually they’ll vent the now boron-laced coolant to the atmosphere to keep containment pressures under control.
Sodium polyborate, by the way, is something you might use around the house, since it is the active ingredient in most flea and tick treatments.
An earthquake with such loss of life is bad enough, but Japan has also just lost 20 percent of its electric generating capacity. And I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that none of those 11 reactors will re-enter service again, they’ve been so compromised.
Adrian Meyer and Karl Rege of Zurich University of Applied Sciences visualize the melting poles, starting 21,000 years ago and advancing 1,000 years into the future.
End summer sea ice is shown. The yellow line shows the actual shoreline. The future projection is based on the assumption of complete cessation of carbon dioxide emissions in 2100 (IPCC A2). Because world population is rather uncertain we froze to its current value.
Check out the video below. Adding some speed could've made it more dramatic, but wow.
[Blue Marble 3000 | Thanks, Geoffrey]
