• Swinxs
  “Swinxs talks, cheers and explains the games, referees and keeps score. It runs on a long-lasting battery to travel to the park, the beach… Each player has a personal colored tag that starts games, retrieves player profiles and measures performance.”
  Tags: games kids children future rfid toys social
• Future Combat Systems
  US Army readying for the future. Weapons-wise, that is, not diplomacy-wise.
  Tags: army technology weapons US future
• Dawdlr to let users Twitter at a â��snailâ��s paceâ�� - Gadgetell
  Like Twitter, dawdlr is a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question. But instead of Twitter�s infamous �what are you doing?� question, dawdlr asks its users in broader terms - what are you doing, you know, more generall
  Tags: online presence tool slow

• 21 Awesome (But Lesser-Known) Open-Source Applications for Windows | Tech Tips For Us
  getting quite hooked on launchy
  Tags: tools computer opensource
• iPhone on Rails - Creating an iPhone optimised version of your Rails site using iUI and Rails 2
  
  Tags: iphone rails code ruby
• Rails 2 Upgrade Notes
  Tip for checking your existing application for deprecated code before upgrading using the following rake task.
  Tags: rails ruby code upgrade

• fireeagle-0.6.3 Documentation
  Ruby gem for FireEagle (FE)
  Tags: geo geocoding rails ruby plugin fireeagle code
• TwitterLocal
  TwitterLocal lets you generate an RSS or XML Feed to filter out Tweets around a certain area. Just enter a city, state, postal code, choose the range of miles you want to include, and hit the button. You’ll instantly get URLs to add to your RSS reader.
  Tags: twitter local geo tools rss LL

From Adam Phillips:

“If sanity is defined by how intelligible we are to each other, then we are living under tremendous pressure to be as transparent as possible. The problem may not be always or only how to better understand each other (and ourselves), but actually what we should do with whatever we don;t understand.”

Thanks Alexandre

From Will Richardson:

“What if we assessed teachers in large part on their abilities to create and consume content effectively as co-learners and co-creators with their students, and to share that work in transparent ways?”

• Carl Zimmer’s Dissection: Your Brain Is a Mess, but It Knows How to Make Fixes
  The job of the brain is to make decisions. These decisions depend on handling signals with extreme precision…. Remarkably, the closer scientists look at the brain, the more noise they discover.
  Tags: brains neuroscience science decisions noise error
• blog.pmarca.com: The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment, part 1: Biases 1-6
  a practitioner’s summary of human psychology and behavioral economics as observed in the real world.
  Tags: psychology entrepreneurship business brains CharlieMunger
• Five Myths About Drinking Water : NPR
  Is bottled water better for you than tap? Or should you choose vitamin-enriched water over sparkling? Experts say, skip it all. None of these products are likely to make you any healthier.
  Tags: health water myths

Additional knowledge of the minutiae of daily life can be not just useless, but actually harmful to us when we make decisions.

From thinking to iterating
Last June, Alex Iskold wrote a piece about the new age of continual partial attention:

There will never be less information, there will always be more of it. Much more. The sooner we recognize it and prepare for this change, the easier it will be for us to embrace this brave new world. The age of Continuous Partial Attention has arrived and it is here to stay.

As Linda Stone defined CPA

“With [continuous partial attention], we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly SCAN for opportunities - activities or people - in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, “What can I gain here?”

Alex also noted that “these days we replace the deep thinking with rapid iteration.”

And he went on to say that this replacement “is not necessarily a bad thing!”

Fire Hydrants
In one famous experiment, the Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner and his student Molly Potter had people identify the object shown in a slide as it gradually came into focus. If viewers made an incorrect hypothesis early on, they tended to persist with it, and had trouble identifying the object even as it became sharp.

Thanks Mike

Moral? According to NNT, it’s this:

“The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they’ll be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory we are not likely to change our minds. So those who delay developing their theories are better off … Remember that we treat our ideas like possessions and it will be hard for us to part with them.

Remember that we are swayed by the sensational. Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit.”

NNT goes on to describe Paul Slovic’s experiment with bookmakers. First, he showed bookmakers 88 variables in past horse races and asked them to choose the most useful ones. Then he gave them the ten most useful variables and asked them to predict the outcome of races. Then he gave them ten more variables and asked them to predict again.

The increase in the information set did not lead to an increase in their accuracy; their confidence in their choices, on the other hand, went up markedly. Information proved to be toxic“

More is not always better
It’s probably a little simplistic to think that these research caveats apply to all information. They apply to situations where you have to predict or forecast. That said, the caveats do seem to imply various things:

1. The iterative mode in the table above isn’t wholly accurate. It can actually lead to more costly mistakes (through the overconfidence it affords). The partial information is a given for both deep thinking and iterative mode, the real difference is frequency of updates. And iterative mode actually hinders the imagining alternative possibilities. We tend to stick with our first possibility and then not be able to ditch it in favour of the fire hydrant.
2. The iterative mode assumes that the brain is an information processing machine. My guess is that this is idealised but wrong. The brain seems much more like a meaning making engine.

Anyway, as far as RSS readers go, I’m going to ditch some of my BBC news feeds , and (not that he does this) have a think about adopting/adapting Ton’s people oriented approach. And I’m going to renew my subscription to The Week

From NNT:

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgement, for uttering the “I don’t know”. Why did the Cold War end? Why did the Persians lose the battle of Salamis? Why did Hannibal get his behind kicked? Why did Casanova bounce back from hardship? …

I am not saying causes do not exist; do not use this argument to avoid learning from history. All I am saying is it is not so simple; be suspicious of the “because” and handle it with care, particularly in situations where you suspect “silent evidence”.

• Restful Authentication with all the bells and whistles
  “There’s a lot of conflicting information and tutorials on restful authentication, and I wanted to share a complete tutorial to help others get started with an authentication system a little faster.” If you see this guy, hug him.
  Tags: rails authentication restful tutorial code

This is (generally) good news.

“Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson has announced a new Task Force, headed by Richard Allan, to take forward proposals in the Power of Information report.”

It does make a government api seem a long way off though. There’s a risk that a few banner community services get chosen and funded by the government at the expense of others, and I hope that’s avoided.

• Applied Cognitive Science: How Cognitive Science Can Improve Your PowerPoint Presentations
  Harvard cognitive scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn, who studies how brains process images, wants to improve the world with his cutting-edge research. And he’s starting with four ways to make your PowerPoint presentations more human brain-compliant.
  Tags: brains presentation rhetoric persuasion powerpoint
• Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars
  “If the first economic revolution was agricultural, the second industrial and the third digital, the fourth will be Open Source — the birthing of a planetary civilization whose development is driven by the unbound human imagination.”
  Tags: Google Virgin Mars travel 2014 quitters AprilFool
• Google’s Design Guidelines
  
  Tags: design guidelines google
• [true knowledge]â�¢ - home
  The crucial difference between our technology and … Wikipedia is that, whereas their users create and edit documents in natural language, here information is in the form of discrete facts … a form that computers can understand and process. [via BBJ]
  Tags: semantic_web ai search

From Conor O’Neill:

“Expecting the public service to build webapps for us is a fool’s errand. They would spend €100m, take five years and it wouldn’t work when it was finished. However, if they make each department’s data available along with some simple APIs, then citizens can do it for themselves, or pay someone to do it. Free unlimited access to all APIs for individual or non-commercial use and some small pay-as-you-go for commercial use…

So what data do we want and need? Anything available under Freedom of Information from crime rates per county to court cases to tax revenue by category. If it exists, we want it.”

Yup. Just been looking for what I’d naively hoped were simple things: an API to help me sort out a GP nearby locator, and an API for OFSTED stuff. Ho hum. Am now fervently hoping the Guardian Free Our Data campaign works. Especially given the conclusion of this (very good) report:

In sum, recognition is slowly emerging in Europe that open access to government information is critical to the information society, the scientific endeavor, and economic growth. However, recent trends towards more “liberal” policies face opposition. This comes from treasuries as well as from entrepreneurial civil servants in charge of “government commercialization” initiatives, who are sometimes tempted to engage in anti-competitive practices. Therefore, these issues require consideration at the highest policy making levels of government.

• russell davies: learning by playing
  hopefully the beginning of something useful
  Tags: learning online kids tools blogs

Great post here (by someone who used to be a real curator):

“real curators don’t just leave a record. They assiduously build their collections, so that each new entry is made in full knowledge of its predecessors and with a deeply thoughtful anticipation for what comes next. These collections vibrate like a spider’s web with each new entry.

Real curators think with their collections. The collections are intelligence, memory, conceptual architecture made manifest. I love the idea that someone would take up this function in the digital world. But that’s not what I see the new “curators” doing. This richer, more authentic, more sincere rendering of the term could accomplish something astonishing. It would help sort and capture contemporary culture with some feeling for context, relative location, relative weight, what goes with what. This is the sort of thing that Pepys accomplished, unwittingly, with his diary. This notion of the curator has yet to find its champion. I don’t think we quite yet have a Pepys of the present day.”

Made me think of The Culture of Collecting again, and the problem with collecting things that aren’t “objects” as such: how do you easily spot what’s missing from your collection of thoughts? In other words, how can you usefully use all these wonderful online tools to avoid thinking kitsch thoughts or blandly repeating yourself?

• The Economist Has No Clothes: Scientific American
  Jevons, Walras, Edgeworth and Pareto developed their theories by adapting equations from 19th-century physics that eventually became obsolete . The strategy .. was as simple as it was absurd�they substituted economic variables for physical ones.
  Tags: science history economics creativity

From Scientific American:

“There is such a thing as expertise when it comes to complex emotions or emotional skills, such as the one of cultivating benevolence,” says Antoine Lutz, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who led the study. “That raises the possibility that you can train someone to cultivate this positive emotion.”

From the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (p.30):

[n.b. the lift coincides with the introduction of GCSE’s to avoid the O-level/CSE divide. Similar evidence at the BBC]

Aside from standards debates, it does make you wonder a) whether the GCSE syllabuses are more female-friendly, b) whether boys need Lutzesque training in empathy and c) if the choice is one of a two-tier O-level/CSE or a two-tier boy/girl, then which one’s preferable?

[Update]
just found this Pinker vs Spelke conversation on where

The speakers discussed research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of gender bias, discrimination, and innate and acquired differences between the sexes.

• To be free, information has to be smart (comments on Chris Anderson’s “Free!”) - O’Reilly Radar
  Anderson’s taxonomy of “free” contains six models that justify giving the information away. The idea of “free as in freedom” (that is, open source information in the GPL or CCs style) doesn’t enter at all into his article. I think it’s a crucial omission.
  Tags: business web2.0 information intelligent
• Office 2.0 Database - My Office 2.0 Setup
  
  Tags: web2.0 tools office productivity online
• Synching Up with the iKid: Connecting to the Twenty-First-Century Student | Edutopia
  “They like everything being electronic — it’s speaking their language.”
  Tags: technology education ikid
• Fawnt - Top free fonts | Font - Archive | Blog Design and Webdesign
  10.000 + fonts to look at… Maybe you don’t need to buy fonts. [via BBJ]
  Tags: design graphics free fonts
• Greg Laden’s Blog : Oral traditions effectively warn people about tsunamis and reduce mortality
  The stories contained information about how to recognize when a tsunami was about to come, such as falling sea levels, and told how people should take action. That’s the reason why casualties [in 1930] were so low.
  Tags: orality literacy tsunami narrative
• The science of religion | Where angels no longer fear to tread | Economist.com
  �Explaining Religion� is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics.
  Tags: research religion science europe
• 3quarksdaily
  Much has been made about the waggle dance, a fox trot of sorts that foraging honeybees do to tell their hive mates when they have found a good food source. There is only one problem: Many bees seem to ignore the information.
  Tags: nature information bees waggle_dance
• Interactions: I’m O.K., My P.C.’s O.K. - New York Times
  Individuals interact with communications technologies in fundamentally social and natural ways. We know intellectually that the screen before them is not flesh and blood, but our ability to distinguish person and language-using machine remains faulty
  Tags: brains interaction computer social manners
• Special issue: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 - FM - Volume 13, Number 3
  Web 2.0 embodies a set of unintended consequences: the increased flow of personal information across networks, the diffusion of identity across fractured spaces, powerful tools for peer surveillance, the exploitation of free labor …
  Tags: article web2.0 criticism

From Worth1000.com via Matt: