• 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