The Order of the Spork

SF author and SIGMA member David Brin's rather ugly slide deck

Run an Android environment on Windows

Combined, the three major blogging platforms -- Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr -- account for 80.5 million unique pairs of eyeballs in October 2011 (Facebook had 139.1 million unique that month.) By the end of 2011, the Nielsen/McKinsey company had tracked over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million in 2006.

Interesting visualization of 10 Petabytes

In my experience, produced a usable, but not phenomenal app. But far easier than trying to learn Android programming.

Some good advice for community brand managers dealing with trolls.

Great news for folks in China, but now that we've publicized how we plan to circumvent the country's censorship technology, can a countermeasure be far behind?

It looks and sounds like Edward, mostly. But Castronova would have read the book and skipped the very safe and pat conclusion that this author heads straight for. He would have read the book to the end. Or at least spent 20 minutes watching TED. Maybe he's winning over his audience before leading them somewhere new.

An animated summary of Wikipedia's history, narrated by Jimbo himself.

first-ever historical mapping and exploration of the full text contents of the English-language edition of Wikipedia, in time and space, with visualizations of modern history captured in under a day. Loading the entire English language edition of Wikipedia into SGI UV 2000, Mr. Leetaru was able to show how Wikipedia's view of the world unfolded over the past two centuries.

It's clear that the Fraunhofer researchers didn't set out to hit this milestone in camera technology. What they were really interested in was trying to improve upon endoscope technology. An endoscope involves a camera at the tip of a tube. The tube contains a wire that transmits the image back to a computer. The tube also serves as a way to physically manipulative the camera to snake it through the gastrointestinal tract, for instance. Typical endoscopes cost around $25,000-30,000 so they must be reused many times. Because the endoscope is going in and out of people's bodies, it must be cleaned and sterilized between each use, which just drives up the cost of maintaining the instrument. It's no wonder that hospitals charge more than $2,000 per endoscopy. All of this, however, would change if the camera was cheap enough to throw away.

As some time passes we're getting a better understanding of what's going on with the iphone and android tracking data.  This post summarizes the research done as of 24 April, 2011. 

In this case, there are four key players. Two of them are a couple: a journalist who lives in New York and a social media specialist who lives in London. The other two have roots in Pakistan: a journalist and documentary filmmaker who recently moved to the U.S. and a political commentator in Islamabad. Each of them contributed to a chain of information that turned one man's offhand comments about a helicopter in the middle of the night into an internationally known work of citizen journalism.

Samsung and Korea's "KT" announces first NFC payment system that will be available to users. 

Dropbox explains changes to their Terms of Service and their various policies and approaches to protecting user data

So many cloud pundits are piling on to the misfortunes of Amazon Web Services this week as a response to the massive failures in the AWS Virginia region. If you think this week exposed weakness in the cloud, you don't get it: it was the cloud's shining moment, exposing the strength of cloud computing. In short, if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model.