Since starting my twice-weekly linklog, I’ve noticed an unexpected benefit, namely, that quite a bit of what I post to my linklog gets retained in my long-term memory. Much more, I suspect, than I would have retained otherwise. Arguably, this isn’t always a good thing, but on the whole it’s pleasing.
Author: Michael Nielsen
Biweekly links for 04/11/2008
- David Crow: Measuring community success
- Thoughts and questions about what it means to say that a community-forming activity is “successful”.
- Alexei Gilchrist: Mindmaps in lectures
- Alexei talks about using mindmaps as a replacement for Powerpoint.
- BoingBoing: Bioethics and cognitive liberty
- Cognitive liberty is the freedom to not have our brains tampered with / scanned. A new fundamental right?
- Marc Andreessen: Birth of Newspapers, part 1: The very first newspaper
- Cityofsound: The street as platform
- Hill has the great eye of an outstanding novelist, who makes us see what is right in front of us: “We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data… constantly logging… patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street
- Google App Engine
- Google follows Amazon into the web services game. These kinds of services are an amazing boon for developers, but I wonder about the business model for the providers- they’ll need to work hard to prevent commodization.
- Jacks of Science
- Entertaining general science blog from Waterloo-Toronto.
- Lorcan Dempsey: The amplified conference
- Nice term for the way many conferences are becoming extended, with an online ramp-up and afterlife.
- Agile Release & Testing Procedures
- Lots of lip service is given to testing. Ilya asks what’s actually done in real, high-quality projects.
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Biweekly links for 04/07/2008
- The Real Watership Down.
- A collection of photos and information about places from Richard Adams’ book.
- Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?
- Stimulating essay on how biology is done.
- Automated scientific discovery
- By putting large databases of papers in machine-readable format, it is possible to do automated inferences from them. This paper describes examples of medical discoveries that have been made this way.
- Scibuntu – Ubuntu Linux for scientist and science students
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SciBarCamp summary
Troy McConaghy has written a terrific four-part summary of his SciBarCamp experience. Part I is here, with further links to parts II, III and IV.
Everything should be code
An idea that rocked my world at SciBarCamp was the understanding that everything should be expressed as code.
This realization was the outcome of two sessions. In one session, Andrew Hessel gave a fantastic talk about synthetic biology, i.e., the direct synthesis of biological organisms, by coding their DNA. One of many fascinating things about the talk was the point of view, which wasn’t so much that of a biologist, as that of a computer programmer. A nice example of this point of view is provided by the BioBricks Foundation:
Using BioBrickâ„¢ standard biological parts, a synthetic biologist or biological engineer can already, to some extent, program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer. The DNA sequence information and other characteristics of BioBrickâ„¢ standard biological parts are made available to the public free of charge currently via MIT’s Registry of Standard Biological Parts.
In another session, Mark Tovey spoke about open source objects (I don’t remember Mark’s exact terminology), and pointed out that using suitable fabrication technology it becomes possible to express objects as code.
In both cases, expressing something we don’t ordinarily think of as code means that all the social and technical processes of software development can be applied. In the ordinary way of thinking it doesn’t make sense to take the “diff” of two objects, and version control (with merging!) would be cumbersome at best. By expressing objects as code, these and many other operations become trivial. Libraries, APIs, and high-level domain specific languages can be built. Widespread distributed collaboration becomes possible. The open source process can be applied. A creative commons can be constructed.
This circle of ideas gives rise to many wonderful questions. What are the right sorts of abstraction when you’re expressing objects as code? Biology? Movies? Music? What sorts of libraries might we build? What’s the lisp of biology? The LAMP stack for music?
Biweekly links for 04/04/2008
- Alis Asaria: Learn To Like Bad News
- Nice advice for managing a team.
- Change Congress
- Lawrence Lessig’s new initiative.
- Siegfried Woldhek: The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
- Good short talk on finding the face of Leonardo Da Vinci.
- Scott Berkun: Lessons from 4 independent years
- Good post on career change, and freelancing.
- Paul Buchheit: Ideas vs Judgment and Execution: Climbing the Mountain
- Interesting analysis of whether ideas or execution are more important.
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Science in the 21st Century
Biweekly links for 03/31/2008
- Adventures in Ethics and Science: Should researchers share data?
- Andrew Vickers: “[T]he real issue here has more to do with status and career than with any loftier considerations. Scientists don’t want to be scooped by their own data, or have someone else challenge their conclusions with a new analysis.”
- Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer
- Stephen Laniel on blogs and the mass media
- “The fight is between generalized media written by journalism-school graduates with limited understanding of specialized domains, and specialists who may or may not know how to write for a mass audience. The specialists are winning hands down…”
- Neil Turok: An African Einstein
- Magnificent talk and vision.
- Clifford Stoll: 18 minutes with an agile mind
- Awesome. “If you really want to know about the future, don’t ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist, don’t ask a code… ask a kindergarden teacher.”
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Biweekly links for 03/28/2008
- Boing Boing’s Moderation Policy – Boing Boing
- “Life is an unending series of auditions. Get used to it.”
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Biweekly links for 03/24/2008
- Overcoming bias on gender equity
- “Do those who want more women in science… understand that more women in some places requires fewer women elsewhere? If so, why don’t they tell us where exactly they want fewer women – and explain why the world is better with women moved?”
- Cosmic Variance: Talking to the Media
- Lots of good advice for scientists.
- Lego Star Wars
- Darth Vader conducts John Williams, in Lego.
- Beaker Sings “Yellow”
- Beaker was born to sing this song.
- GAME OVER project
- Weird human art project in which humans simulate video games like Tetris, Pong, and so on.
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