The Analytics X Prize is “to use statistical techniques and any data sets you can find to predict where crime, specifically homicides, will occur in the city”.
Drew Conway at Zero Intelligence Agents has posted some of his progress so far using spacial regression.
CNN: “Techies unite to brainstorm help for Haiti”
Check out CrisisCamp Haiti
Usware Blog: “Doing things with Django forms”
Love this post by John Nunemaker and programming: “I Have No Talent”:
It is true. I have no talent. What I do have is a lot of practice. And I am not talking about occasionally dabbling in Ruby on the weekends. I am talking about the kind of practice where I beat code that isn’t working into submission (though often times the code wins).
I’d call it some long-awaited recognition for many. Gawker: Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer.
Hmm… have I qualified as a Programmer-Journalist in the past?
It used to be common place when a women was raped to blame her in America: to say that she wore the wrong clothes, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, or sent out the ‘wrong signals’. Unfortunately, this attitude still exists in parts of the world.
It is still commonin America to take the default position that when a person loses their job, their house, their lively hoods, to put the blame on their shoulders. Even in the ‘Great Recession’ we are now in. They didn’t work hard enough. They didn’t move with the times fast enough. They were losers or uneducated due to their own laziness.
I have heard, horrifically, when people have lost children, or gotten cancer, or were dealing with mental illness, they simply didn’t *pray* enough. That God must be teaching them a lesson.
All this is echoed in what Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson spewed this week.
I’m a free speech absolutist, so I’m not going to say these creatures don’t have a right to speak.
But fuck them.
You have the power to walk away, turn the channel, delete that bookmark.
Events like the earthquake in Haiti do put things in perspective. In addition they help separate those that actually *care* for other human beings from those that think they are the center of the world or are the marketers of that.
Update: Satan writes Pat Robertson a letter.
As Fred Clark says Pat Robertson would tell Jesus he must have deserved it.
The news out of Haiti this week is beyond horrific. While there has been a burst of giving enabled by cellphones that are lowering the barriers to philanthropy, if you haven’t already, give, and if you can, give again.
It’s a moment that those into cyberpunk have been looking for, for a long time – when a multinational corporation whose bread and butter is in cyberspace itself confronts a nation-state. When Google posted to their blog “A New Approach To China” it was historic for many reasons: it was an *Internet company* confronting a *country* over *hacking* (try and digest that for a moment), the first most of us heard about this was from Google’s blog post, and it highlights issues of having to do with intellectual property, with free speech, and access to information.
Wow.
You can go on and on with questions, thoughts, concerns, and as usual there is a terrific Metafilter: Metafilte thread to check out.
Related:
NYTimes: Scaling the Digital Wall in China : “The Great Firewall of China is hardly impregnable.”
I started to pull together some choice quotes from Bruce Sterling, answering questions about the “State of the World 2010” at the WELL, but realized I’d be quoting far too much. You are better off reading the whole thing yourself. Enjoy.
Okay, one quote! In this he is discussing network-culture:
It’s not that print’s a medium, and the web’s a medium, and you get to migrate between media. The Web is a metamedium that turns everything it grips into network-culture.
*So it’s easy to see that mags are in for it. What’s a little harder is looking at the hollow shell of your once-favorite antique shop and realizing that’s all about eBay. “Gee, I’m on the web all the time now… time for a stroll, it’s a sunny day… Gosh, my neighborhood’s full of spooky holes.” Gothic High-Tech.
Update: Wired: Katie Hafner The Epic Saga of The Well